How does a pre-industrial society provide welfare to its most vulnerable and impoverished populations? What are the roles that define providers and recipients in the absence of a centralized public administration? These are some of the major questions tackled by Maren Ehlers in her vivid account of poverty in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan, which focuses on the dynamics of status group relationships in a proto-industrial welfare system. Drawing mainly from official journals kept by municipal leaders in the rural region of Ono, Ehlers documents over six chapters how traditional hierarchies adapted to the economic and social needs of lower class groups within a framework of benevolent seignorage and ritual performance. This system of charity and exchange was remarkably flexible and persistent in the face of catastrophic famines, fires, and epidemics, as well as larger economic and political changes that threatened the existing social order, and continued its influence even after the feudal era was replaced by a modernizing Meiji state in the late nineteenth century.

The book ranges widely in perspective, from general discussions of regional history and status order to detailed accounts of two particular lower class groups, the beggars and the blind, before returning to examples of hunger relief and adaptation to the new Meiji state. Descriptions of beggars like Shiro, a boy from a mountain village found dead in Ono town, provide poignant examples of how individuals of little or no means fit within the highly structured nature of Tokugawa society. Despite being organized around Confucian principles of authority and occupational caste, marginalized communities were still able to maneuver within these constraints with a surprising amount of success. Authorities adhered to institutional norms and noblesse oblige in granting petitions and extraordinary relief during crises, enabling the socio-economic order to survive protests, sickness, and starvation. Within this performative process of rulers giving and supplicants taking, Ehlers is persuasive in suggesting that at least at the margin social mobility was possible and the lines within status groups were often blurred.

The sections describing the two specific low caste groups are highly evocative of the constraints facing marginal communities and support the thesis that status order was highly localized. At the same time, this localization suggests that these groups’ experiences may not be representative of the impoverished in other parts of Japan at the time when regions were largely autonomous. The contrast with the more general context of poverty relief in other chapters is also evident in the lack of more quantitative evidence that these two groups had an outsized role among the poor. Here, it would be useful to add more tables like in other chapters that give a sense of proportion among the various status groups living in the Ono region relative to the population as a whole. As with most historical research, the ambiguity may reflect the coverage of the data sources, but it also raises the question of whether the journals kept by town officials accurately describe the lower class experience since they are filtered through the lens of the literate and powerful.

There is also uncertainty as to what status order means given that one of the main theses of the book is that there was fluidity among the groups and that it was not strictly based on heredity, occupation, or wealth. If social status was not inherited or well-defined by outward markers, how is it procured or lost? The rise of vagrancy in the latter half of the Tokugawa period suggests that (downward) social mobility existed, but the motivations for abandoning one’s land and occupation are unclear. If alternative economic opportunities made mobility attractive, how sustainable would be a system that enforces order based on externally imposed status? The ad hoc responses by political authorities in maintaining social control, which was one of the motivations in defining distinct social classes, indicate the existing system was reactive and ill-prepared for the pressures of wider market integration and commercialization. Coupled with dissatisfaction even among lower class samurai and wealthy townspeople that ultimately led to the collapse of the shogunate regime, perhaps the existing framework of status order was less adaptable than Ehlers believes.

From an economic development perspective, labor market restrictions like status order create inefficiencies in the allocation of resources and on balance its strictures seem to belie the net benefits to those living in the margins, as demonstrated by peasants choosing to leave their land. Furthermore, the improvisational policies to novel shocks during the Tokugawa period meant a lack of certainty for longer term investment and growth, which is contrasted with the forceful building of centralized institutions during the Meiji period as discussed in the latter chapters. It remains an open question what are the broader implications on inequality and poverty alleviation within traditional systems of social organization and whether the Ono experience has analogs in other regions of Japan or countries. That said, as a corrective to historical scholarship that has long emphasized groups represented at the higher end of the spectrum, Ehlers has admirably marshaled qualitative evidence to fill in some of the gaps at the lower end.