Book review: Agrarian Origins
Mar. 19th, 2014 10:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic 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.
Historiographical Engagement: Documents, many of which were published in other people's work; some engagement with then-current literature of economic "backwardness"
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples As a consequence of village integration into the national market, "peasant society took on an unprecedented mobility of which the effects were felt far beyond the boundaries of the peasant class; agriculture became competitive, productivity increased, commercial and industrial activity in the countryside flourished; there were even profound shifts of political power in many villages" (x).
# Land patterns in the 17thC: regional patterns of farming indicated degree of economic development--more advanced (many smaller holdings) in Kinai, older pattern prevalent outside it (large holdings worked by expanded family group, often supplemented with labor from outside even the extended family unit).
# Extended family group in latter pattern comprised nuclear family, affines and cognates, and servants and nago, who settled on the land in return for labor and were probably descended from hereditary servants.
# Over the course of the 17thC in particular nago families gradually achieved independent status as autonomous producers, through the growth of tenancy, the reduction of main family (oyakata) holdings, and the rise of by-employments. The reduction of oyakata holdings was partly accomplished through the inheritance system, which created a class system in the village that mirrored the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the large families themselves through the creation of branch families.
# Thus, the 17thC village consisted of clusters of mutually dependent farming units, not autonomous ones, and "through cooperation the group as a whole attained a degree of self-sufficiency that was impossible for any of its members alone–a self-sufficiency imposed by physical isolation and the rudimentary state of the market" (50). These clusters/groups were united by male descent from a common ancestor and a common protective deity, and replicated the social hierarchy of the village in miniature. In the actual social hierarchy of the village the heads of lineages comprised the class of people who could act for the community because "they stood each at the apex of a system of farming, kinship, and property rights that knitted a group of families together in intricate interdependence" (64). Furthermore, these leading families tended to act together, "for uniting them were marriage ties, class interest, and a common concern in preserving the authority of the community" (ibid).
# Once a village began to integrate its production with the market, everything changed: "it started but never ended with closer relations to the market, for buying and selling were merely surface indications of changes that went to the very heart of peasant life. Crops, labor organization, farming techniques, even the view men took of such things as wealth, work, and neighbors changed with the altered relation to the market" (86).
# One important aspect of this change was agricultural technology; few of the innovations adopted in the Edo period were actually new, but all of them achieved much wider uptake than they ever had before. The "technical changes of this period tended to strengthen the solidarity of the nuclear family and its role in farming," and "all of the important innovations in farming increased the productivity of either land or labor or both" (92). The new spirit of enterprise that began to permeate agriculture was related to the growth of the market, but it was related to the growth of family self-interest as productive: for the first time, greater productivity brought profit to an individual family rather than to the village as a whole, incentivizing greater effort (because taxes remained fixed). This in turn exaggerated the trend toward smaller farming units, as did the increasing cost of labor due to its increasing specialization. (Thus economies of scale actually did not hold in larger units because larger units could not incentivize member production as effectively as smaller units, i.e. nuclear families.) Newly adopted: commercial fertilizers, greater numbers of plant varieties, extension of irrigation, increasing specialization. Crucially, many of these innovations saved labor in one area that was then used in another for greater productivity, such as multiple cropping and essentially permanent cultivation in many areas.
# These changes led to the conversion of hereditary servants into indentured laborers serving first long- and then short-term contracts, and finally to wage labor, at an ever-increasing wage rate: "together with technical changes in farming and the grown of industrial by-employments, [these developments] forced a shift from tezukuri to tenant farming on large holdings–with important results for the entire farming community" (123).
# What decisively elevated small holdings over larger was by-employments, the profits of which only family units could claim and which allowed it to achieve almost full employment. Thus tenancy solved the under productivity problem of large holdings where indentured laborers could not, since indentured laborers were always in danger of absconding and since they had to be fed and paid even when they were not working on the farm. One effect of all this was the disappearance of the nago as a legal status, which was part of the conversion of labor services to rents, and also the depersonalization of the oyakata/tenant relationship, which was part of the "general weakening of the role of cooperation and obligation in farming" as a whole (140). This also entailed the development of new economic relationships between members of cooperative groups, relationships that were market transactions of momentary convenience. Thus the rise of self-interest, and the introduction of competition into the landlord/tenant relationship. As a consequence of that, at least five types of rent relationships evolved with different shares of risk and profit awarded to tenants, but even in 1921 these relationships were admixed, although with a general trend to expose the tenants more and more directly to the vicissitudes of the market.
# Obviously as a consequence, new class relations emerged in the village, nakedly and pitted against each other by the market. One important feature of this was the increasing accumulation of landownership, which had as its concomitant development the creation of a class of landless people. (NB: these are cultivation rights, not the actual titles; that came in Meiji.) Moreover, landowners increased their wealth through forms other than land, namely village trade and industry and also moneylending. At the same time, however, there was an extraordinary degree of social mobility within the village over the course of the Tokugawa era, concentrated (unsurprisingly) in the areas where commercial farming and rural industry were most developed. Over the long run, families were just as likely to go up as to go down, and in the Kinai in particular, peasant notables increasingly came to take on warrior roles such as the collection of revenues, as well as the tastes and mores of urban society, thus separating them from their fellow, less wealthy peasants and creating a social gap in the village not seen since the days of Hideyoshi.
# Over time these shifts brought villages to political conflict, if not political crisis. In general, pressure to reform the medieval system of political organization tended to result in victory for the opposition, although who exactly constituted the opposition is not easily generalizable, as the cross-cutting of legacy political status with new wealth was not always congruent. Conflict was essentially over who held the privileges to participate in village decision-making, with the decisions themselves a secondary (but often catalyzing) area of discord. In villages with miyaza, such distinctions and disjunctures were particularly distinct, and the universal tendency was the dissolution of the miyaza or its expansion to include the entire village, rendering the miyaza/non-miyaza system of privileges moot.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Japan was able to modernize beginning in the Meiji period "was in no small part due to the agrarian changes of the preceding century and a half" (201). Smith also argues that peasant support for the Restoration may have been important in the new Meiji government's radical repudiation of the old status system and its attendant hierarchies. [We can imagine here, if the four statuses are placed next to each other on a class continuum (so X is status, Y is class), the unified interests of a "middle stratum" or "middle class" {yes, I use the term deliberately} of lower-class samurai and higher-class peasants whose interests and outlooks were sufficiently similar as to allow unity. And indeed, these were the people out of whom the new Meiji era formed its young men, and the government its bureaucrats. Ditto merchants, but their political participation in the Restoration was quite low.] However, even in Meiji and after, "although modernization generated in towns and cities new attitudes destructive of tradition, and greatly affected some important aspects of agriculture, the countryside remained a vast and populous hinterland of conservatism" (210). Smith also argues that "modernization was achieved, therefore, without reducing rural living standards or even taking the increase in productivity that occurred" (211), which I am not actually sure was true--while it seems correct that the tax rate remained fixed from Tokugawa to Meiji, it is also true that Meiji involved the first new cadastral surveys since the C17, and that all the new land brought under cultivation was thus subject to taxation. Rural standards of living did not decline compared to Tokugawa, perhaps, but compared to urban standards of living they were stagnant at best and then declining. Finally, Smith argues that "for upward of two hundred years the agricultural labor force had been unwittingly preparing for the transition to factory employment," an argument he explored more fully later in his career (212).
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
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.
Historiographical Engagement: Documents, many of which were published in other people's work; some engagement with then-current literature of economic "backwardness"
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples As a consequence of village integration into the national market, "peasant society took on an unprecedented mobility of which the effects were felt far beyond the boundaries of the peasant class; agriculture became competitive, productivity increased, commercial and industrial activity in the countryside flourished; there were even profound shifts of political power in many villages" (x).
# Land patterns in the 17thC: regional patterns of farming indicated degree of economic development--more advanced (many smaller holdings) in Kinai, older pattern prevalent outside it (large holdings worked by expanded family group, often supplemented with labor from outside even the extended family unit).
# Extended family group in latter pattern comprised nuclear family, affines and cognates, and servants and nago, who settled on the land in return for labor and were probably descended from hereditary servants.
# Over the course of the 17thC in particular nago families gradually achieved independent status as autonomous producers, through the growth of tenancy, the reduction of main family (oyakata) holdings, and the rise of by-employments. The reduction of oyakata holdings was partly accomplished through the inheritance system, which created a class system in the village that mirrored the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the large families themselves through the creation of branch families.
# Thus, the 17thC village consisted of clusters of mutually dependent farming units, not autonomous ones, and "through cooperation the group as a whole attained a degree of self-sufficiency that was impossible for any of its members alone–a self-sufficiency imposed by physical isolation and the rudimentary state of the market" (50). These clusters/groups were united by male descent from a common ancestor and a common protective deity, and replicated the social hierarchy of the village in miniature. In the actual social hierarchy of the village the heads of lineages comprised the class of people who could act for the community because "they stood each at the apex of a system of farming, kinship, and property rights that knitted a group of families together in intricate interdependence" (64). Furthermore, these leading families tended to act together, "for uniting them were marriage ties, class interest, and a common concern in preserving the authority of the community" (ibid).
# Once a village began to integrate its production with the market, everything changed: "it started but never ended with closer relations to the market, for buying and selling were merely surface indications of changes that went to the very heart of peasant life. Crops, labor organization, farming techniques, even the view men took of such things as wealth, work, and neighbors changed with the altered relation to the market" (86).
# One important aspect of this change was agricultural technology; few of the innovations adopted in the Edo period were actually new, but all of them achieved much wider uptake than they ever had before. The "technical changes of this period tended to strengthen the solidarity of the nuclear family and its role in farming," and "all of the important innovations in farming increased the productivity of either land or labor or both" (92). The new spirit of enterprise that began to permeate agriculture was related to the growth of the market, but it was related to the growth of family self-interest as productive: for the first time, greater productivity brought profit to an individual family rather than to the village as a whole, incentivizing greater effort (because taxes remained fixed). This in turn exaggerated the trend toward smaller farming units, as did the increasing cost of labor due to its increasing specialization. (Thus economies of scale actually did not hold in larger units because larger units could not incentivize member production as effectively as smaller units, i.e. nuclear families.) Newly adopted: commercial fertilizers, greater numbers of plant varieties, extension of irrigation, increasing specialization. Crucially, many of these innovations saved labor in one area that was then used in another for greater productivity, such as multiple cropping and essentially permanent cultivation in many areas.
# These changes led to the conversion of hereditary servants into indentured laborers serving first long- and then short-term contracts, and finally to wage labor, at an ever-increasing wage rate: "together with technical changes in farming and the grown of industrial by-employments, [these developments] forced a shift from tezukuri to tenant farming on large holdings–with important results for the entire farming community" (123).
# What decisively elevated small holdings over larger was by-employments, the profits of which only family units could claim and which allowed it to achieve almost full employment. Thus tenancy solved the under productivity problem of large holdings where indentured laborers could not, since indentured laborers were always in danger of absconding and since they had to be fed and paid even when they were not working on the farm. One effect of all this was the disappearance of the nago as a legal status, which was part of the conversion of labor services to rents, and also the depersonalization of the oyakata/tenant relationship, which was part of the "general weakening of the role of cooperation and obligation in farming" as a whole (140). This also entailed the development of new economic relationships between members of cooperative groups, relationships that were market transactions of momentary convenience. Thus the rise of self-interest, and the introduction of competition into the landlord/tenant relationship. As a consequence of that, at least five types of rent relationships evolved with different shares of risk and profit awarded to tenants, but even in 1921 these relationships were admixed, although with a general trend to expose the tenants more and more directly to the vicissitudes of the market.
# Obviously as a consequence, new class relations emerged in the village, nakedly and pitted against each other by the market. One important feature of this was the increasing accumulation of landownership, which had as its concomitant development the creation of a class of landless people. (NB: these are cultivation rights, not the actual titles; that came in Meiji.) Moreover, landowners increased their wealth through forms other than land, namely village trade and industry and also moneylending. At the same time, however, there was an extraordinary degree of social mobility within the village over the course of the Tokugawa era, concentrated (unsurprisingly) in the areas where commercial farming and rural industry were most developed. Over the long run, families were just as likely to go up as to go down, and in the Kinai in particular, peasant notables increasingly came to take on warrior roles such as the collection of revenues, as well as the tastes and mores of urban society, thus separating them from their fellow, less wealthy peasants and creating a social gap in the village not seen since the days of Hideyoshi.
# Over time these shifts brought villages to political conflict, if not political crisis. In general, pressure to reform the medieval system of political organization tended to result in victory for the opposition, although who exactly constituted the opposition is not easily generalizable, as the cross-cutting of legacy political status with new wealth was not always congruent. Conflict was essentially over who held the privileges to participate in village decision-making, with the decisions themselves a secondary (but often catalyzing) area of discord. In villages with miyaza, such distinctions and disjunctures were particularly distinct, and the universal tendency was the dissolution of the miyaza or its expansion to include the entire village, rendering the miyaza/non-miyaza system of privileges moot.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Japan was able to modernize beginning in the Meiji period "was in no small part due to the agrarian changes of the preceding century and a half" (201). Smith also argues that peasant support for the Restoration may have been important in the new Meiji government's radical repudiation of the old status system and its attendant hierarchies. [We can imagine here, if the four statuses are placed next to each other on a class continuum (so X is status, Y is class), the unified interests of a "middle stratum" or "middle class" {yes, I use the term deliberately} of lower-class samurai and higher-class peasants whose interests and outlooks were sufficiently similar as to allow unity. And indeed, these were the people out of whom the new Meiji era formed its young men, and the government its bureaucrats. Ditto merchants, but their political participation in the Restoration was quite low.] However, even in Meiji and after, "although modernization generated in towns and cities new attitudes destructive of tradition, and greatly affected some important aspects of agriculture, the countryside remained a vast and populous hinterland of conservatism" (210). Smith also argues that "modernization was achieved, therefore, without reducing rural living standards or even taking the increase in productivity that occurred" (211), which I am not actually sure was true--while it seems correct that the tax rate remained fixed from Tokugawa to Meiji, it is also true that Meiji involved the first new cadastral surveys since the C17, and that all the new land brought under cultivation was thus subject to taxation. Rural standards of living did not decline compared to Tokugawa, perhaps, but compared to urban standards of living they were stagnant at best and then declining. Finally, Smith argues that "for upward of two hundred years the agricultural labor force had been unwittingly preparing for the transition to factory employment," an argument he explored more fully later in his career (212).
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