Book review: Agrarian Origins

Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.

Main Argument: In the Tokugawa period across Japan, cooperative farming was displaced by individual family arming, and the individual family "clearly emerged as the center of production organization and economic interest" (ix). The most important cause of this was the growth of the market, which was disruptive. In general, these changes show that Japanese agriculture is dynamic, not sempiternally fixed, and that changes in farming during the Tokugawa period were the very opposite of regressive.

( Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan )

Critical assessment: Tom Smith, ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Fifty-five years on and this book has barely aged--some of the details are sketchy, and see my comments for the question of rural immiseration in the Meiji period and after, but all in all, working mostly from sketchy and unevenly published documents cited in other people's works, he laid it out, and got it right.

Further reading: Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan; Smith, Nakahara; Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization