The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Filed in Early Modern Social/Economic History

Early Modern Social and Economic History of Japan: The Tokugawa LegacyPost war historians of Japanese socio-economic history argued extensively in favor of a Japanese version of the Whig perspective on history in which practically everything in the Tokugawa early modern leads to the modern age of Japan as an indigenous and stable evolution.Many of us in the field who are dealing with the Tokugawa period have also been greatly intrigued by the politicized question of Japanese global power or at least its dramatic beginnings with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a kind of a revolution that catapulted Japan alone among the countries of Asia into the company of the great powers of the West.It is therefore not surprising that in her recent accomplished geo-historical study of the social and economic processes of proto-industry in early modern Japan, Kären Wigen begins with similar concerns in her recent book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920, (1995).In discussing the peripheralization of the Ina Valley in South Shinano an arena that links the Tokugawa and post Meiji periods through the perspective of global market forces, Wigen comments aptly, "Japanese development poses one of the more insistent puzzles of modern history: how an isolated and decentralized state, far from the European heartland, managed to metamorphose in a few short decades into a formidable global power." 1 While the Whig interpretation suggests continuity and a smooth transition, Wigen suggests a sharp break.Here I treat the socio-economic history of the "early modern," covering roughly the years 1600-1868, the Tokugawa period through the Meiji Restoration, but the broad question remains, how 8