Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan provides a welcome look at Japanese economic thought during the Tokugawa era for historians and economists interested in Japan or world history. The volume explicitly aims to challenge misperceptions about early modern Japan and suggest new ways of approaching the age's economic thought and history.
In general, the approach works. The first installment in a Brill series, “Monies, Markets and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900,” the book provides an introduction to early Japanese economic thought and, most promisingly, its relation to broader topics in world and economic history. Originally prepared for conferences in Germany and New York, the volume seeks to refute, or at least nuance, ideas of a Confucian disdain for commerce, rigid class and intellectual divides, and feudalism and mercantilism as refracted through English and American eyes.
Drawing in particular on network theory and ideas from writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, the volume makes connections between these concepts and existing secondary works in Japanese history (in Japanese and English) while remaining grounded in Japanese primary sources.
Refreshingly, the volume treats its interpretive frames and themes as inclusive rather than exclusive. The book invites non-Japan specialists to the discussion, rather than barricading itself in intra-academic parochialism. Each of the chapters combines extensive primary source work with an eagerness to think seriously about the material and consider its place in broader economic, Japanese, and world histories.
Of particular interest is an emphasis in several of the chapters on kokueki 国益, which, though translated in terms of mercantilism, is given a more nuanced reading than the English term typically receives in historical terms and in its relation to contemporary events. World and economic historians will find much here to complement work by historians such as Francois Crouzet, David Todd, Philippe Minard, Jean-Yves Grenier, and Sophus Reinert in rethinking mercantilism and the development of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century world economies.
Each of the chapters has something of use to say. Ethan Segal looks at money in the transition from medieval to early modern Japan. Kawaguchi Hiroshi describes the not always clear distinctions between market economics and state economics, individuals and societies, or in Kawaguchi's terms, freedom and control. In a discussion in which readers may find (unintentional) echoes of Michel Foucault's Order of Things, Kawaguchi explains how the Tokugawa era understood “freedom” (jiyū 自由) to mean a non-stagnant state rather than a classical English, or modern American, reading implying an isolated individual and autonomous agency.
Gregory Smits looks at the Ryūkyū official and scholar Sai On to show the compatibility of Confucian thought with development of state infrastructure. Ochiai Kō describes how Tokugawa officials promoted the domestic sugar industry as a means of import substitution. Bettina Gramlich-Oka looks at one example of social networks and the exchange of ideas on foreign trade and colonization. Jan Sýkora also looks at social networks and their use in the exchange of economic and political ideas. Mark Ravina examines the Confucian use of granaries as lending and credit agencies. Ishii Sumiyo discusses the life of a local Tokugawa entrepreneur to emphasize the links and continuities between ostensibly pre-modern Tokugawa and modern Meiji.
In the final chapter, Mark Metzler takes ideas from the previous chapters to consider cycles of policy regimes (inflationary/deflationary, activist/laissez-faire, commercial/agrarian, centralized/decentralized, open/closed, etc.) and how they are established, function, and change. That there are recurring cycles – in policy, economic events, and economic thought – should be nothing new to historians, economists, or observant non-specialists. A tendency exists, however, to treat one moment or set of circumstances, implicitly or explicitly, as discrete and stagnant or bounded only by its most recent predecessor and successor, thereby missing the ongoing, and interacting, shifts in policies, ideas, institutions, and events.
Metzler's chapter does an extremely good job of laying out the issues, applying them to Tokugawa Japan, and raising junctures at which they may apply more broadly globally or to different regions. Most importantly, he provides various frames through which historians and social scientists, studying Japan and otherwise, may profitably develop their own research in ways relevant to both the past and present. It is this sort of inclusiveness, openness, and relevance, within the academy and without, that is the volume's greatest strength and one that the future volumes in the series would be well served in following.
Specialists working in Japanese history and economic history will find the volume helpful in terms of ideas, presentation, and, somewhat surprisingly for a conference volume, as a reference tool. Of particular note is the decision to include kanji for terms translated into English as well as the more traditional, and far less helpful by itself, practice of presenting the Japanese original in romaji. A glossary of terms adds to the volume's usefulness as a reference work. Non-Japan specialists working in world or economic history will find the volume of use as an introductory reference, bibliographic guide, and as a source of ideas and categories for comparative work.
If Brill were savvy in their promotion, they would provide a cheaper paperback or ebook version that could be used with both undergraduate and graduate courses on Japan and world history. The editors have been thoughtful enough to make the conference volume double as a reference work. There should be no reason, financial or otherwise, why Brill could not come out with at least a low cost ebook version.
