Friday, March 11 12:30-2:00 (lunch at 12:00)
Mark Cohen
The Challenge of Commerce to Political
Structures: Did Commercialization Undermine
the Ancien Regime in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth- Century Japan?
The dominant historical accounts of the Tokugawa era (1600-1868) in Japan share with prominent theories of the causal interrelation between the two processes of state formation and the transition to capitalism in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the assumption that the expansion of commercial activity represents a force fundamentally contradictory to pre-capitalist political institution, and which challenges rulers to either adapt or be undermined. Using an alternative theoretical account, based on the work of Robert Brenner, that situates commerce within the social property relations characteristic of pre-capitalist societies, this paper argues that the economic trends of the latter half of the Tokugawa era had very little to do with the shogunate’s and domains’ chronic fiscal crises and administrative weakness. Instead, the class of “peasant” landlords succeeded in claiming a portion of the agrarian surplus from poorer peasants and then successfully defended it against a lordly assault in the eighteenth century. The entry of this rural elite into commerce, far from representing a force that in some way contradicted the existing political structures, entailed winning from the traditional urban merchants and artisans a significant share of the relatively fixed market for consumption by daimyo and samurai concentrated in the castle-towns, without challenging the limits of, let alone pushing to transform, those structures.