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The Diffusion of Cotton Processing and Trade in the Kinai Region in Tokugawa Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

William B. Hauser
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Abstract

The diffusion of cotton processing and trade were major features of the expansion of rural commerce and handicraft production in the Kinai region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both were responses to demands for sources of non-agricultural employment in Japanese villages. They made available off-season by-employment for small farmers and offered new types of employment to those under-employed in agriculture. The expansion of rural participation in cotton processing and trade brought the villagers into conflict with urban merchants and artisans. This initially led to reinforcement of urban commercial prerogatives by the government and subsequently to legal confrontations between rural and urban merchant groups which in 1823 were decided in favor of the rural merchants. The role of the government shifted from protection of urban merchant interests to denial of their monopoly and monopoly rights and tacit support for the expansion of rural processing and trade.

Overall, the expansion of rural commerce and handicraft industry illustrate the economic and social changes which characterized the Kinai region during the Tokugawa period and the commercialization of the village economy. It also illustrates the inability of the Tokugawa bakuju to limit or direct the process of societal change.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , August 1974 , pp. 633 - 649
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1974

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References

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