Proto-Industrialization has been defined as a transitional phase on the way to modern, factory industrialization, characterized by “the development of rural regions in which a large part of the population lived entirely or to a considerable extent from industrial mass production for inter-regional and international markets” (Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm [KMS] 1981:6). This article will use protoindustrialization as a lens through which to reexamine a number of issues in early modern Japanese history, including the relationship between commercial agriculture and rural industry, the role of the state in economic development, and the economic geography of the late Tokugawa period. Perhaps most importantly, I hope by looking at proto-industrialization to reach a better understanding of the transition from the feudalism of the Tokugawa era to the capitalist development of the Meiji period and beyond.

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.

Accounting has been defined as “the art of classifying, recording, and reporting significant financial events to facilitate effective economic activity” (Davidson 1968:14). The description, terse as it is, evokes the image of accounting's role as overseer in the global formation of mercantile and industrial capitalism. According to the historical sociologists Werner Sombart and Max Weber, methodical accounting methods were basic attributes of the development of modern capitalism in the West, and in the West alone. Yet, as Gary Hamilton observes, “uniqueness is a comparative claim, as well as a presumption underlying much historical research” (1985:66–67). In other words, claims of singularity should be redocumented by sound historical comparisons, rather than continually inferred on the basis of conventional wisdom.

The idea of trader communities spread across the shores of the Indian Ocean, or along the caravan routes of the Asian heartland, is a familiar one. Once designated as the ubiquitous “pedlars” of the “traditional trade of Asia,” these traders have more recently been described using the term “diaspora”—a term not restricted in its application, needless to add, to the Asian context. In the hands of Philip D. Curtin, the idea of traders in a diaspora has become a simple but powerful tool to analyze the phenomenon of what he terms “cross-cultural trade.” What, then, is a diaspora? To Curtin, a diaspora is “a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities,” that are, moreover, separated from their “host societies” in each locus in which they are situated (Curtin 1984:5). He continues: “The traders were specialists in a single kind of economic enterprise, whereas the host society was a whole society, with many occupations, class stratification and political divisions between the rulers and the ruled” (Curtin 1984:5).