This documentary survey places economics, and coinage in particular, at the heart of an analysis of the development of early medieval Japan, a period usually characterized as one of political and military instability. It has a methodological and comparative interest for those who study the development of the state and the origins of monetary economies but also for those intrigued by the extent to which the economy triggers changes in political and social structures and core-periphery relations.
The book approaches its subject by analyzing particular institutions, but it is essentially a chronological survey that concentrates on the late twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries and also reviews the following two hundred years (to ca. 1600). The author's main concern is to investigate what happens to a society that had mainly lost the need for an indigenous coinage (by ca. 1000) but almost two hundred years later adopted an imported (Chinese) currency. The new copper coin was not centrally controlled but circulated in sufficient quantities to stimulate a money economy that was largely articulated by those secular and religious leaders in the provinces and in the subservient agricultural communities. The loss of central control had apparently stimulated a new form of monetary economy that in turn encouraged the growing power of the periphery at the expense of the center.
The changed relationships both between the center and the periphery and the elite and the rest of the population are constants against which it is possible to observe the stages in the adoption of a monetary economy which normally are seen in the context of a developing central power. These stages include the decline of personal relationships based on a reciprocal or gift exchange system in the face of alternative, monetary means of exchange (thirteenth century); the commodification of goods; and the commutation of payments into cash with the increased use of currency. Even in those areas where payments remained in kind, the impact of the currency allowed the specified goods to be renegotiated so that payment could be made in commodities now more available via the markets (fourteenth century). The last stage, again familiar from other geographical contexts, saw the development of bills of exchange and credit with a burgeoning group of middlemen or merchants that reestablished the interaction between the center and provinces.
The development of a currency that was not centrally controlled also promoted dramatic changes in Japanese political leadership. The initiative shifted between various elements of the provincial leaders, from civilian proprietors, both religious and secular, to warriors who, over the course of two hundred years, significantly changed their role.
This survey is, out of necessity, based on the surviving documentation, essentially governmental and elite records, which largely dictates a “top down” view of these significant developments. Although generic agricultural communities are given some initiative in the transformations, future work might examine the question of agency and may lead to a reconsideration of the role of peasant farmers (and indeed the merchants), as scholars have done for other pre-modern economies. The whole topic would also benefit from a numismatic approach, particularly with regard to the volume and velocity of the copper coinage: that might well contribute to at least one item on Segal's agenda for future work: the exploration of how economic growth occurred at a time of fragmented political authority.
