| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Luke S. Roberts. Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Tosa. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 251. $59.95.

For several decades, local history and the history of ideas have been among the most exciting specialties in Japanese historiography, and so it is particularly apt that Luke S. Roberts has produced a superbly researched and well-written study situated at the intersection of these approaches. Although Roberts does not exactly accomplish all the claims he makes for his study, he fulfills a sufficient number to make his analysis of the origins of mercantilist thought a landmark study of early modern Japan. 1

The subject of Roberts's study is the domain of Tosa on the island of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's major islands. Tosa was among the larger of the over two hundred domains comprising Japan during the Edo or Tokugawa period (1600–1868), and it was Marius Jansen, Roberts's principal mentor, who pioneered studies of Tosa—as well as the modernization thesis that Roberts embraces—in English. Roberts describes how, during the seventeenth century, Japanese society and economy were structured along essentially Confucian notions of service to one's lord in a hierarchy that culminated in the shogun in Edo. Seventeenth-century economic activity throughout Japan centered on the great metropolises of Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, and Roberts demonstrates how Tosa domainal merchants as well as their lords often preferred to market their wares in Osaka, even when better prices might be obtained within the domain, in order to obtain extra-domainal income useful for discharging commercial loans and other forms of indebtedness. . . .

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