This ‘privilege’ refers to a benefit that less developed countries have over developed countries in terms of their respective development processes. It seems the section from the piece you linked that best summarizes this concept is this:

“Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without traveling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past.”

One standout example of this process in action is early Meiji-era Japan. China’s defeat at the hands of Western powers during the Opium Wars, followed by Japan’s forced ‘opening’ by US Commodore Mathew Perry created an internal crisis in Japan that saw the centuries-old Shogunate bakufu toppled by the new Meiji government. Early leaders of the Meiji period acknowledged that there were things to learn from the West with such slogans as “Eastern ethics, Western technology,” and “enrich the country, strengthen the military,” which promoted their adoption. Japan’s need to modernize and catch up to Western powers soon went beyond merely the adoption of material goods, however, and came to include foreign institutions and ideas and as well.

Japan’s ‘privilege of historical backwardness’ is captured by historian Minhyuk Hwang’s description of this period as the equivalent of the “European discovery of the New World, the challenging of old beliefs initiated by the Reformation, the destruction of the old class systems through “bourgeois revolutions,” and rapid increases in productivity via the Industrial Revolution in concert,” for Japan. This is to say, rather than experience the gradual process of trial and error, the successes and failures in science and statecraft, that lead the West to the point it had reached then, Japan was instead able to follow the footsteps that these countries had left behind and leap from a feudal to a modern industrial nation in the span of a few decades.

Speaking in more concrete terms, from 1871-1873, the Japanese government conducted the Iwakura Mission in which it sent several bureaucrats, scholars, and students on an observational tour of England, the United States, and parts of Western Europe. During this time, the participants observed the political and educational systems, public transit, factories, shipyards, and weaponry of these countries, and had important conversations with leaders in each of these fields. They then took these findings back to Japan to be implemented. Domestically, Japan also imported experts from abroad to serve as advisors in various parts of the Meiji government. In this way, Japan was able to catch up to more advanced nations by importing the newest technologies and institutions available rather than seek to develop them independently.

This process speaks to the part following the Trotsky passage I quoted above:

“The European colonists in America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England was made possible by the very backwardness of their capitalist development.”

While Meiji Japan was not starting from nothing, its jump to the forefront of innovation, without the long and messy history that had accompanied the same process in other countries, allowed it a kind of carte blanche from which it could enter modernity with less historical baggage (in some areas) and advance from there.

In summary, Japan’s relative lack of development compared to Western industrialized powers did not hinder its modernization process, rather it was an advantage that allowed Japan to skip over the time it took to develop these technologies and embrace them in their most advanced forms.

I hope this short example has helped to clear up somewhat what is meant by the ‘privilege of historical backwardness.’ As for resources to search for, perhaps see if there is something similar to the Iwakura Mission that China conducted with more industrialized capitalist countries in order to learn from them and bring that knowledge back to use at home.

Sources:

Fukuzawa, Yukichi, and Eiichi Kiyooka. The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Hwang, Minhyuk. Fukuzawa Yukichis Bourgeois Liberalism: The Betrayal of the East Asian Enlightenment. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

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