The Japanese economy grew during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). It may even have grown “intensively”—that is, faster than the population, meaning that the average person's standard of living rose over the course of the era. Intensive economic growth was exceptionally rare anywhere in the world before the nineteenth century, when industrialization and capitalism transformed the global economy. Given its importance to comparative world history, it is surprising that the Tokugawa economy has not attracted more scholarly interest, particularly in the Anglophone world.

The problem may be the persistence of a set of images about Tokugawa economic thinking—that profligate samurai authorities disparaged merchants as parasites and commerce as immoral, and saw peasants as so many sesame seeds to be squeezed for all they were worth. Even without going so far, it is easy to see Tokugawa economic thought as essentially conservative, even hidebound, and to attribute whatever economic growth there was as having occurred despite, not because of, the best efforts of policy makers and the intellectuals who informed their actions.

The essays collected in Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan collectively do much to dispel the notion that Tokugawa thinkers and policy makers were incapable of creative economic thinking. They address diverse topics but share common themes, none more important than the insight that, far from being hostile toward commerce, thinkers of all backgrounds emphasized the appropriate circulation of commodities as the key to a healthy body politic.

As a conference volume rather than a monograph, the central argument of Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan is dispersed unevenly across its introduction and nine chapters. Nevertheless, it presents a compelling challenge to previous historiography. Many narratives of Tokugawa history posit an opposition in economic thought between reactionary officials and visionary outsiders. Tetsuo Najita has been particularly influential in this regard. In two books, Visions of Virtue: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), he argues that oppositional discourses emerged to challenge the political economy of the Tokugawa authorities. These discourses were diverse, but at heart they represented commoners' efforts to validate their contributions to economic life, regardless of whether they were elite merchants (Visions of Virtue) or nameless peasants (Ordinary Economies). This dynamism from below, Najita argues, drove economic change in the Tokugawa period. In contrast, the contributors to this volume see economic thought as a collaboration between rulers and subjects.

The book begins and ends with contextualizing essays. Ethan Segal starts with a survey of the money economy in late medieval Japan. He argues that the surprisingly widespread use of money is probably indicative of pre-Tokugawa economic growth, and that the physical presence of an abundance of cash—millions of Chinese coins circulated in medieval Japan—helped to jumpstart the growth of a truly monetized economy in the early modern period. Concluding the volume is Mark Metzler's detailed analysis of the interplay between long-term macroeconomic trends and economic thought and policies. Aside from the value of the argument per se, the chapter is the only one that engages economic history in the language of economists.

The rest of the chapters fall into two clusters. One focuses on networks mobilized in the interest of promoting kokueki, or the prosperity of the realm. Kawaguchi Hiroshi argues that the institutions of the status system endowed merchants and other commoners with considerable freedom, provided they rationalized their behavior as contributing to kokueki. The Saga domain in Kyushu is a case in point, as Jan Sýkora demonstrates in his analysis of Shōji Kōki, a merchant intellectual who mixed social conservatism with a vigorous argument that merchants should have latitude to pursue ventures that contributed to domainal prosperity. Kudō Heisuke, the Sendai doctor examined in Bettina Gramlich-Oka's long chapter, is famous for his cautionary writings on the Russian threat to Japan, but he also wrote extensively on the benefits of foreign trade conducted in the national interest. Both Shōji and Kudō were exemplary outsiders who took advantage of their extensive personal networks to promote their ideas. They had a kindred spirit in Itō Yōzō, a rural entrepreneur and practical thinker in the Meiji period. Ishii Sumiyo argues that, beneath a Westernizing veneer, Itō—a disciple of Fukuzawa Yukichi—promoted the same virtues of entrepreneurship in the national interest as the Tokugawa-era thinkers examined in other chapters.

The essays in the second cluster deal reveal the pragmatism of early modern economic thought. Ochiai Kō's examination of the history of the sugar industry reveals the authorities in the Satsuma domain to have been both clever and pragmatic in supplanting imports with domestically produced sugar. Likewise, Gregory Smits argues that Sai On, who ruled the Ryukyu kingdom in the mid-eighteenth century, linked prosperity and moral virtue in a pragmatic take on Confucian statecraft. He saw economic activity as a good that would lift the Ryukyuan people out of their straitened circumstances and facilitate virtuous rule by officials. His reputation as a killjoy notwithstanding, he encouraged commoners to distill liquor in the hope that the Ryukyuan people would consume their way to national prosperity. Mark Ravina's essay on “Confucian banking” describes community granaries (shasō), which functioned as rural development banks. Policy makers credited the great Song thinker Zhu Xi with the idea of the community granary, but they either did not know or did not care that Zhu Xi had sought to avoid the very sort of government management seen in Japan.

With its challenge to rethink the constraints of Confucian ideology in the political economy of Tokugawa Japan, Economic Thought in Tokugawa Japan builds on the contributions of works such as Luke Roberts's Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-century Tosa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Ravina's Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). The essays collected here demonstrate that economic thinking in the Tokugawa era was far from the paint-by-numbers conservatism of a caricatured Confucianism, but rather a lively field with plenty of room for creativity and innovation.