Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2014-03-08 11:10 am
ahorbinski) wrote2014-03-08 11:10 am
Entry tags:
Book review: Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan
Bibliographic Data: Ravina, Mark. Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Main Argument: There was "a simple fact of early modern politics" in Japan: "the shogunate was peripheral to broad areas of political practice" (2). Furthermore, for a lord, "the moral and economic rejuvenation of his domain" were "the areas where shogunal control and oversight were weakest," at least in the case of the so-called "kunimochi" domains, which were granted a degree of autonomy and prestige not available to most of the 240-odd other daimyo. It is no coincidence that four kunimochi domains (Satsuma, Chôshû, Tosa, and Saga) overthrew the shogunate, but the fact that so many domains were passive in the Restoration points to the federal nature of the system: having ceded diplomatic and "foreign policy" prerogatives to Edo, "daimyo were both fiercely protective of local autonomy and dependent on their union [with Edo] for survival" (15). This "federal" union was the first and indeed the necessary casualty of the Meiji Restoration.
Historiographical Engagement: The previous generation of early modern Japan scholars, including Tom Smith.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Ravina looks at three domains: Yonezawa, Hirosaki, and Tokushima in the era of the "midlife crisis" of the Tokugawa period, when increasing commercialization threatened the legitimacy of samurai rule and demanded new competencies from rulers. Ravina insists on recognizing the disjunctures in political discourse between large and small domains, pointing out that their views on themselves and politics were necessarily quite different--large domains called themselves "states" (kokka), while smaller domains called themselves "holdings" (ryô). He argues that his focus on finance and taxes, because finances are 1) comparable and quantifiable; 2) "reveal how daimyo rule was shaped by conflicting obligations"; and 3) "point to the ambiguous boundaries of daimyo autonomy" and to "what might be termed Tokugawa federalism: the coexistence of powerful regional regimes with a strong central government" (5).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Early modern Japan: "spatial fragmentation of authority was paralleled by a vertical division of political rights" (17). Ravina concludes after some in-depth discussion that the Tokugawa political order was a "compound state" because "it aptly reflects the composite legitimacy of the early modern order" and because "'compound state' allows us to avoid the term han," which "was never used in shogunal investitures or official documents" and which "reflects how advocates of a strong shogunate or imperial authority understood daimyo authority and, in doing so, effaces how daimyo, particularly 'country-holding' daimyo, viewed their own domains" (27, 28). Furthermore, kuni, kokka, and kokumin all have multiple meanings; they can refer variously to the domain or to the whole of Japan, or to all at once; care must be taken in translation lest we "find evidence of state-building because we have put it there" through the process (34). In Ravnia's analysis, daimyo political discourse drew on three sources of legitimacy: "feudal authority, patrimonial authority, and suzerain authority" (ibid). Although ideally all three were brought to bear in concert (from the daimyo perspective) and ideally all three acted to reinforce daimyo obligations to the shogun (from the shogunal perspective), in reality, "early modern politics thus involved both multiple sites of power and multiple sources of legitimacy," meaning that "daimyo administrators engaged issues of political economy in a complex web of conflicting ideologies and interests" and that "for domain statesmen, the key to politics lay in confronting the challenges of a changing political economy without precipitating the overt collision of interests and authorities" (45).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In Ravina's view, economic matters created the essential bond between domain and subject; domains taxed peasants to provide samurai income, and thus the two sets of interests were diametrically opposed. However, as well as the more standard "weapons of the weak," Tokugawa peasants also were able to avail themselves of peasant protest, both real and threatened, to get domains to act in their interest through the daimyo rhetoric of benevolence and mercy. In Ravina's view, essentially, "domain administrators sought to find the combination of taxes and stipends that produced the least destabilizing mix of opposition," which was affected by the fact that 1) "taxes tended to rise with economic output per commoner" and 2) "taxes rose as the number of retainers peer commoner increased" (49). Thus, "domains with more productive commoners collected more in revenue per commoner" and second, "domains with more retainers per commoner collected more in revenue per commoner" (ibid). Thus domains were subject to market forces, as "increases in commoner output, for example, were usually related to either protoindustrialization or commercialization," which reoriented commoner producers into extra-domainal economic networks (52). Having attempted to survey the diversity of political economic practices of domains, Ravina concludes that "this multiplicity of political economic practices" is "a distinguishing feature of the Japanese compound state"; from this perspective, what distinguishes Meiji first and foremost is that it is generalizable, as the Tokugawa domains share "the problems they perceived and the ideological boundaries of their shared discourse" rather than any one policy or solution (69-70).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at political economy in Yonezawa, which through the 1790s faced a depopulation crisis brought about by oppressive taxation to provide for an inflated samurai population. In the 1790s, domain reformers recognized that "policies that did not appeal to the economic interests of farmers would provoke sustained resistance," and fortunes began at last to improve somewhat (80). The key to these reforms was a re-evaluation of morality (greed and envy were now politically useful) and the consequent demographic policies that flowed from it, rewarding large families, newlyweds, and the births of children, among other things. The complement to rural reconstruction was samurai by-employments, specifically weaving; "by providing its retainers additional income, the domain was able to support the samurai estate without taxing the peasantry into destitution and desertion" (104). [It says something that realizing this took the better part of 200 years.] Furthermore, "having made weaving a form of service, Nozoki could demand that retainers serve with customary honor and valor. Retainers who produced poor cloth were not defending their patrimony but failing to repay their obligations to the country (kokuon) and thus disgracing, rather than honoring, their ancestors" (109). Further, "the promotion of samurai weaving was part of the promotion of a 'national' culture of weaving and sericulture in which all Yonoezawa could participate," just as the Meiji government did for all samurai in the next century, redefining what it meant "by appealing to the broader economic needs of the 'nation'" (110). The Uesugi still sucked at picking the winning side, however; they opposed the Tokugawa in the wars of unification and the imperial forces in the Bôshin War.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at political economy in Hirosaki, now part of Aomori. Mostly due to location, the lynchpin of Hirosaki efforts at attaining fiscal solvency were land development and reclamation, and "the distinguishing feature of Hirosaki fiscal policy was the role of samurai labor" in the same (120). Samurai were key in opening land in the 1600s, and though they were recalled castle towns in the 1700s, after the Tenmei famines samurai resettlement on landed fiefs emerged as the way to economic salvation, although it "antagonized all parties concerned: retainers, landlords, and peasants" (139). After the failure of resettlement policies, the domain turned to peasant settlers to develop and reclaim the land and thus regained a measure of solvency, and under the pressures of the Tenpô famines, the Hirosaki retainers de facto deposed their spendthrift daimyo and the domain continued to stagger along. Notably, as in the era of unification, the Hirosaki leadership chose the winning side, for all the good it did them.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at political economy in Tokushima, which comprised old Awa and Awaji. With ready access to the national commercial core, commercial agriculture and protoindustrialization began early in the domain and intensified accordingly; by the 1700s, Tokushima was the largest and best-regarded producer of indigo in Japan, with the result that the domain was obliged to combat Osaka-based cartels of indigo merchants: "the fight against oligopsony led the domain to extensive economic intervention, including trust busting, the establishment of agricultural price supports, and the regulation of subsidization of agricultural and commercial banking. Like Yonezawa, the domain also sought to insure the quality of its exports by regulating production methods" (159). Indigo had an immense but indirect on the domain fisc because farmers could pay nengu in kind, in domain currency, or in a voucher, the latter two of which were financed, for taxpayers, by indigo production. After incurring a peasant rebellion against mercantilist indigo policy in the 1750s, the domain inaugurated an open market policy which recognized the economic interests of farmers not only as legitimate but as consonant with those of the domain, leading the domain directly into conflict with Osaka cartels in the 1760s and then into conflict (albeit by subterfuge) with the shogunate when its judgment did not conform to Tokushima desires, leading to the shogunate banning Tokushima from restricting the indigo trade at all in 1790. After this point Tokushima hit on the strategy of promoting rival cartels of its own, gradually extending its monopoly system to the rest of the country that lasted, despite shogunal moves to the contrary, until the economic chaos of the 1860s.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Ravina points out that the shogunate "lacked the ideological or political hegemony of a national sovereign" partly because it "never abandoned its simultaneous identities as an imperial servant, the leader of a warlord federation, and an autonomous warlord house" (196). Equally importantly, he provides an important corrective to the impact-response theories of people such as Jansen and Beasley when he writes that
Also, Maruyama is wrong because the modern nation-state is not historically inevitable but rather historically contingent, and the transformation of "aspects of Japanese culture…identified as the foundations of an unawakened nationalism" into "symbols of national unity was a process determined by specific historical conditions and state actions," epitomized in reverse by the waffling on the status of han and the daimyo found in very early Meiji (209). In other words, as Ravina concludes, "the nation dominated politics only after politics produced the nation" (210).
Critical assessment: This is an excellent book, and I cannot overstate the degree to which I agree with Ravina's final conclusions.
Further reading: Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery
Meta notes: I cannot overstate the degree to which the United Statesare is weird historically. The proper comparands for Japan are not the United States but the countries of Europe.
Main Argument: There was "a simple fact of early modern politics" in Japan: "the shogunate was peripheral to broad areas of political practice" (2). Furthermore, for a lord, "the moral and economic rejuvenation of his domain" were "the areas where shogunal control and oversight were weakest," at least in the case of the so-called "kunimochi" domains, which were granted a degree of autonomy and prestige not available to most of the 240-odd other daimyo. It is no coincidence that four kunimochi domains (Satsuma, Chôshû, Tosa, and Saga) overthrew the shogunate, but the fact that so many domains were passive in the Restoration points to the federal nature of the system: having ceded diplomatic and "foreign policy" prerogatives to Edo, "daimyo were both fiercely protective of local autonomy and dependent on their union [with Edo] for survival" (15). This "federal" union was the first and indeed the necessary casualty of the Meiji Restoration.
Historiographical Engagement: The previous generation of early modern Japan scholars, including Tom Smith.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Ravina looks at three domains: Yonezawa, Hirosaki, and Tokushima in the era of the "midlife crisis" of the Tokugawa period, when increasing commercialization threatened the legitimacy of samurai rule and demanded new competencies from rulers. Ravina insists on recognizing the disjunctures in political discourse between large and small domains, pointing out that their views on themselves and politics were necessarily quite different--large domains called themselves "states" (kokka), while smaller domains called themselves "holdings" (ryô). He argues that his focus on finance and taxes, because finances are 1) comparable and quantifiable; 2) "reveal how daimyo rule was shaped by conflicting obligations"; and 3) "point to the ambiguous boundaries of daimyo autonomy" and to "what might be termed Tokugawa federalism: the coexistence of powerful regional regimes with a strong central government" (5).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Early modern Japan: "spatial fragmentation of authority was paralleled by a vertical division of political rights" (17). Ravina concludes after some in-depth discussion that the Tokugawa political order was a "compound state" because "it aptly reflects the composite legitimacy of the early modern order" and because "'compound state' allows us to avoid the term han," which "was never used in shogunal investitures or official documents" and which "reflects how advocates of a strong shogunate or imperial authority understood daimyo authority and, in doing so, effaces how daimyo, particularly 'country-holding' daimyo, viewed their own domains" (27, 28). Furthermore, kuni, kokka, and kokumin all have multiple meanings; they can refer variously to the domain or to the whole of Japan, or to all at once; care must be taken in translation lest we "find evidence of state-building because we have put it there" through the process (34). In Ravnia's analysis, daimyo political discourse drew on three sources of legitimacy: "feudal authority, patrimonial authority, and suzerain authority" (ibid). Although ideally all three were brought to bear in concert (from the daimyo perspective) and ideally all three acted to reinforce daimyo obligations to the shogun (from the shogunal perspective), in reality, "early modern politics thus involved both multiple sites of power and multiple sources of legitimacy," meaning that "daimyo administrators engaged issues of political economy in a complex web of conflicting ideologies and interests" and that "for domain statesmen, the key to politics lay in confronting the challenges of a changing political economy without precipitating the overt collision of interests and authorities" (45).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In Ravina's view, economic matters created the essential bond between domain and subject; domains taxed peasants to provide samurai income, and thus the two sets of interests were diametrically opposed. However, as well as the more standard "weapons of the weak," Tokugawa peasants also were able to avail themselves of peasant protest, both real and threatened, to get domains to act in their interest through the daimyo rhetoric of benevolence and mercy. In Ravina's view, essentially, "domain administrators sought to find the combination of taxes and stipends that produced the least destabilizing mix of opposition," which was affected by the fact that 1) "taxes tended to rise with economic output per commoner" and 2) "taxes rose as the number of retainers peer commoner increased" (49). Thus, "domains with more productive commoners collected more in revenue per commoner" and second, "domains with more retainers per commoner collected more in revenue per commoner" (ibid). Thus domains were subject to market forces, as "increases in commoner output, for example, were usually related to either protoindustrialization or commercialization," which reoriented commoner producers into extra-domainal economic networks (52). Having attempted to survey the diversity of political economic practices of domains, Ravina concludes that "this multiplicity of political economic practices" is "a distinguishing feature of the Japanese compound state"; from this perspective, what distinguishes Meiji first and foremost is that it is generalizable, as the Tokugawa domains share "the problems they perceived and the ideological boundaries of their shared discourse" rather than any one policy or solution (69-70).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at political economy in Yonezawa, which through the 1790s faced a depopulation crisis brought about by oppressive taxation to provide for an inflated samurai population. In the 1790s, domain reformers recognized that "policies that did not appeal to the economic interests of farmers would provoke sustained resistance," and fortunes began at last to improve somewhat (80). The key to these reforms was a re-evaluation of morality (greed and envy were now politically useful) and the consequent demographic policies that flowed from it, rewarding large families, newlyweds, and the births of children, among other things. The complement to rural reconstruction was samurai by-employments, specifically weaving; "by providing its retainers additional income, the domain was able to support the samurai estate without taxing the peasantry into destitution and desertion" (104). [It says something that realizing this took the better part of 200 years.] Furthermore, "having made weaving a form of service, Nozoki could demand that retainers serve with customary honor and valor. Retainers who produced poor cloth were not defending their patrimony but failing to repay their obligations to the country (kokuon) and thus disgracing, rather than honoring, their ancestors" (109). Further, "the promotion of samurai weaving was part of the promotion of a 'national' culture of weaving and sericulture in which all Yonoezawa could participate," just as the Meiji government did for all samurai in the next century, redefining what it meant "by appealing to the broader economic needs of the 'nation'" (110). The Uesugi still sucked at picking the winning side, however; they opposed the Tokugawa in the wars of unification and the imperial forces in the Bôshin War.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at political economy in Hirosaki, now part of Aomori. Mostly due to location, the lynchpin of Hirosaki efforts at attaining fiscal solvency were land development and reclamation, and "the distinguishing feature of Hirosaki fiscal policy was the role of samurai labor" in the same (120). Samurai were key in opening land in the 1600s, and though they were recalled castle towns in the 1700s, after the Tenmei famines samurai resettlement on landed fiefs emerged as the way to economic salvation, although it "antagonized all parties concerned: retainers, landlords, and peasants" (139). After the failure of resettlement policies, the domain turned to peasant settlers to develop and reclaim the land and thus regained a measure of solvency, and under the pressures of the Tenpô famines, the Hirosaki retainers de facto deposed their spendthrift daimyo and the domain continued to stagger along. Notably, as in the era of unification, the Hirosaki leadership chose the winning side, for all the good it did them.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at political economy in Tokushima, which comprised old Awa and Awaji. With ready access to the national commercial core, commercial agriculture and protoindustrialization began early in the domain and intensified accordingly; by the 1700s, Tokushima was the largest and best-regarded producer of indigo in Japan, with the result that the domain was obliged to combat Osaka-based cartels of indigo merchants: "the fight against oligopsony led the domain to extensive economic intervention, including trust busting, the establishment of agricultural price supports, and the regulation of subsidization of agricultural and commercial banking. Like Yonezawa, the domain also sought to insure the quality of its exports by regulating production methods" (159). Indigo had an immense but indirect on the domain fisc because farmers could pay nengu in kind, in domain currency, or in a voucher, the latter two of which were financed, for taxpayers, by indigo production. After incurring a peasant rebellion against mercantilist indigo policy in the 1750s, the domain inaugurated an open market policy which recognized the economic interests of farmers not only as legitimate but as consonant with those of the domain, leading the domain directly into conflict with Osaka cartels in the 1760s and then into conflict (albeit by subterfuge) with the shogunate when its judgment did not conform to Tokushima desires, leading to the shogunate banning Tokushima from restricting the indigo trade at all in 1790. After this point Tokushima hit on the strategy of promoting rival cartels of its own, gradually extending its monopoly system to the rest of the country that lasted, despite shogunal moves to the contrary, until the economic chaos of the 1860s.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Ravina points out that the shogunate "lacked the ideological or political hegemony of a national sovereign" partly because it "never abandoned its simultaneous identities as an imperial servant, the leader of a warlord federation, and an autonomous warlord house" (196). Equally importantly, he provides an important corrective to the impact-response theories of people such as Jansen and Beasley when he writes that
What Commodore Perry and subsequent British and French expeditions brought o Japan was not the West but the modern nation-state in its most corrosive form. This new political animal, an unprecedented fusion of popular mobilization and advanced technology, required an unprecedented response. …we misunderstand the impact of foreign powers if we view it entirely in an Asian or "Oriental" context. The Tokugawa political order fell to the very forces of modern nationalism that had transformed early modern Europe. Having cut its teeth on the Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburgs, modern nationalism destroyed the multiple, coterminous sovereignties of Tokugawa Japan. The processes that led Japanese statesmen to destroy the subnational governments of Tokugawa Japan were simultaneously at work in Germany and Italy, creating nation-states out of "geographical expressions." … What made the "Western impact" decisive was not its origin but its character. (200)
Also, Maruyama is wrong because the modern nation-state is not historically inevitable but rather historically contingent, and the transformation of "aspects of Japanese culture…identified as the foundations of an unawakened nationalism" into "symbols of national unity was a process determined by specific historical conditions and state actions," epitomized in reverse by the waffling on the status of han and the daimyo found in very early Meiji (209). In other words, as Ravina concludes, "the nation dominated politics only after politics produced the nation" (210).
Critical assessment: This is an excellent book, and I cannot overstate the degree to which I agree with Ravina's final conclusions.
Further reading: Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery
Meta notes: I cannot overstate the degree to which the United States