Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa

by Luke S. Roberts

• ISBN13: 9780521621311
• ISBN10: 0521621313
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-09-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book explores the historical roots of economic nationalism within Japan. By examining how mercantilist thought developed in the eighteenth-century domain of Tosa, the author shows how economic ideas were generated within the domains. During the Edo period (1600-1867), Japan was divided into over 230 realms, many of which developed into competitive states that struggled to reduce the dominance of the shogun's economy. The seventeenth-century Japanese economy was based on samurai notions of service and a rhetoric of political economy which centred on the lord and the samurai class. This 'economy of service', however, led to crises of deforestation and land degradation, government fiscal insolvency and increasingly corrupt tax levies, and finally a loss of faith in government. Commoners led the response with a mercantilist strategy of protection and development of the commercial economy. They resisted the economy of service by creating a new economic rhetoric which decentred the lord, imagined the domain as an economic country, and gave merchants a public worth and identity unknown in Confucian economic thought.

Table of Contents

List of maps, tables, and figures	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments	xi	(2)
Dates and units of measurement used in the text	xiii
1 Introduction	1	(31)
Kokueki and nationalism	2	(10)
The creation of the Tokugawa polity	12	(5)
The alternate attendance system and domainal export economics	17	(4)
Research on domainal economic policy and kokueki thought	21	(11)
2 The geography and politics of seventeenth-century Tosa	32	(24)
Yamauchi Katsutoyo receives Tosa from the Tokugawa	33	(5)
The four administrative regions of Tosa: Castle town, port, mountain, and village	38	(14)
Service to the bakufu in the seventeenth century	52	(4)
3 Creating a crisis in Tosa, 1680-1787	56	(29)
Tosa's population explosion	56	(18)
Ecological problems	74	(5)
Rising agricultural taxation	79	(6)
4 The decline and restoration of domain finances	85	(18)
An outline of domain income sources	86	(10)
The restoration of financial health after 1787	96	(7)
5 Voices of dissatisfaction and change: The petition box	103	(31)
The history and historiography of petition boxes	106	(5)
The creation of a petition box in Tosa	111	(6)
The usage of the petition box	117	(17)
6 Imagined economices: Merchants and samurai	134	(20)
The kokueki of the merchants	137	(7)
The samurai economy of service	144	(10)
7 Declining service	154	(23)
Naming the problem	155	(3)
The Tenmei protests	158	(4)
The Tenmei reform leadership	162	(6)
Tenmei reform policies toward Edo	168	(3)
The payoff for Tosa	171	(6)
8 Cooking up a country: Sugar, eggs, and gunpowder, 1759-1868	177	(21)
The paper industry	178	(11)
Sugar, eggs, and gunpowder: New projects	189	(9)
9 Conclusion	198	(7)
Glossary of terms and manuscript document titles used in the text	205	(8)
Sources for figures and tables	213	(7)
Works and documents cited	220	(23)
Index	243