Book Review

Asia

Scholars on both sides of the Pacific have long debated the nature of the early modern order in Japan. They have dubbed it variously "centralized feudalism," a "federation," the "Tokugawa state," the bakuhan state (a combination of bakufu and han, or domains), and the "flamboyant state," among others. Adding to this discourse is Mark Ravina, who offers a different model. Using Mizubayashi Takeshi's "revisionist" term, he argues that Japan during the years 1600–1868 is best explained as a "compound state." Focusing on the large domains of the "country-holding" daimyo, who were eighteen in number and whose territories comprised one-third of the territory of Japan, Ravina maintains that they functioned as autonomous states even as they acknowledged the legitimacy and authority of the Tokugawa bakufu. Japan was, in short, a collectivity of states within a state (here Ravina makes useful analogies with late eighteenth-century Prussia). The perspective adopted is important in that it takes the political order on its own terms and declines to view it as an imperfect precusor to the nation-state—a problem with some other studies. But Ravina also contends that below this group of eighteen "we can discern a more amorphous category of powerful lords and great domains . . . [which] manifested many of the same qualities" (p. 3). Although beyond the bounds of the present book, future work on some of these other domains is necessary to support that assertion.

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The stated purpose of this work, which is written in fluid, felicitous prose, is to "examine the political implications of demographic change and protoindustrial development" (p. 9). In situating his study during the mid-Tokugawa period, Ravina is a part of a trend in recent scholarship that has concerned itself with this previously "dead" period. A political economy approach allows him to examine how daimyo rule was shaped by conflicting obligations (e.g. between the commoners he ruled and the samurai retainers who served him) and points to the ambiguous boundaries of daimyo autonomy.

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