An Asian Route to Capitalism: Religious Economy and the Origins

An Asian Route to Capitalism: Religious Economy and the Origins of Self-Transforming Growth in Japan Author(s): Randall Collins Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 62, No. 6 (Dec., 1997), pp. 843-865 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2657343 Accessed: 02/06/2009 08:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asa. 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The industrial revolution could take place only in the context of preexisting agricultural capitalism, that, in turn, required a breakout from the obstacles constituted by agrarian-coercive societies. Organizational conditions necessary for self-sustaining capitalist growth included markets not only for commodities but for all factors of production (land, labor, and capital), combined under control of entrepreneurs motivated by an economic ethic of future-oriented calculation and investment. Weber was mistaken in holding that the capitalist breakthrough occurred only in Christian Europe. I propose a neo-Weberian model in which the initial breakout from agrarian-coercive obstacles took place within the enclave of religious organizations, with monasteries acting as the first entrepreneurs. The model is illustrated by the case of Buddhism in late medieval Japan. The leading sector of monastic capitalism spread into the sur- rounding economy through religious movements of mass proselytization which narrowed the gap between clergy and laity. Confiscation of Buddhist property at the transition to the Tokugawa period transferred the capitalist dynamic to the secular economy of an agricultural mass market, opening the way for a distinctive Japanese path through the industrial revolution. hree main types of economic structures traditional economic structure; what those have existed in world history: (1) kin- societies lack is the sustained innovativeness ship-organized networks, which lack a sepa- of modern self-transforming capitalism rate state organization and in which eco- which expands to mass markets and prolifer- nomic exchange is shaped by marital alli- ates market niches and new products. ances and ceremonial gift exchange; (2) Historically, self-transforming capitalism agrarian-coercive societies, in which a spe- has gone through three key phases: cialized military class appropriatesthe land (3a)a small leading sector within agrarian- and coercively extracts most of the surplus coercive societies set the innovative dy- produce; and (3) capitalist market econo- namic in motion; mies, with their dynamic of self-transforming growth. Market relations alone are not (3b)the spread of capitalist market structures sufficient to cause major economic change. made agricultural production dynamic; Markets may exist in other types of societ- and ies, but as ancillary and subordinate to the (3c)the industrial revolution of production Direct correspondenceto Randall Collins, by machines harnessed to inanimate en- Departmentof Sociology, Universityof Pennsyl- ergy sources set off the expansion of vania, Philadelphia,PA 19104-6299 (collinsr@ nonagriculturalproduction. sas.upenn.edu).I am indebtedfor commentsand advice to Koya Azumi, StephenKalberg, collo- Our task is to explain how at least some quiumparticipants at InternationalChristian Uni- world regions first passed from agrarian-co- versityand Joetsu University, and a seriesof ASR ercive societies (type 2 above) to type 3a, and reviewers. thence to 3b and 3c. The industrial revolu- American Sociological Review, 1997, Vol. 62 (December:843-865) 843 844 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW tion (3c) could have occurred only on the ba- many aspects of long-standing Asian culture sis of 3b, a preexisting agricultural market and social structure, even if capitalism was capitalism (Moore 1966; Wallerstein 1974). not initiated in Asia. A stronger claim is that Large-scale industrial technology is eco- in Japan, the cultural, economic, and social nomically useless if it does not occur in the structures of the Tokugawa period signifi- context of institutions supporting a mass cantly prepared the way for industrial capi- market and the mass provision of the factors talism. Stronger yet are argumentsthat Japan of production. Technological innovation- independently developed capitalism before the creation of machines as well as other new European incursion. techniques of production and distribution- These revisionist argumentsare weakened, is not the key, but only the most visible form however, by their failure to examine their par- of this structural dynamism of capitalism. ticular historical causes against a full-scale The most importanttransformation, the topic theoretical model of what is involved in the of this paper, is two steps further back: the transition to capitalism. Particular items of breakout from an agrarian-coercivestructure culture such as Confucian values (suggested in a leading sector (3a) which introduces the in McCormack and Sugimoto 1984; Rozman structuresof self-sustaining growth. 1991) or a religious work ethic (Bellah 1957) Such a leading sector is potentially revolu- are not in themselves sufficient to effect a tionary because it is antithetical to the struc- breakout from agrarian-coercive structures; tural conservatism of agrarian-coerciveorga- nor is the existence of merchants or trade nization. This is not to say that agrarian-co- (stressed by Hamashita 1994; Howe 1996; ercive societies are stagnant in every respect. Kawakatsu 1994; and Sanderson 1994). Only Such societies can undergo geopolitical ex- a general model of the institutional compo- pansion and contraction, population growth nents of capitalist growth and of the obstacles and decline, as well as geographical migra- to these institutions in agrarian-coercive so- tion and concentration. Long-distance trade cieties provides the context in which we can routes may develop as well as atrophy, and assess whether the conditions for the inde- may even constitute what are sometimes pendent development of capitalism were called world systems (Abu-Lughod 1989; present in Japan and elsewhere. Gills and Frank 1991). The key question is We begin, then, with a general institutional whether such changes merely create quanti- model of capitalist development. A previous tative variations within the agrarian-coercive application of this model (Collins 1986, social structure of economic relations. As chap. 3) showed how the Christian monastic long as the dominant structure is a military economy during the High Middle Ages governing class that coerces production for (1050-1300) initiated the earliest phase (3a) its own consumption, wealth concentrates in of capitalist transformation in Europe; the the palaces and spectacular monuments of Protestant Reformation of the 1500s and the the capital cities, and does not circulate back accompanying confiscation of church prop- through investment in a sector where capi- erty marked the full breakout to the secular talist innovation becomes sustained. economy-the second phase (3b) of struc- The transition from 2 to 3a and thence to tural growth. Here I develop the argument in 3b took place in a leading sector composed regard to the economic effects of the main of the material economy of religious institu- popular religion of East Asia, the Buddhism tions inside agrarian-coercivesociety. In this of medieval China and Japan. paper I argue that this occurred in medieval and early modern Japan on the basis of Bud- THE STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS dhist institutions, paralleling the early eco- OF SELF-TRANSFORMING nomic development of Europe under Chris- CAPITALISM tianity. The view that Asian capitalism is an adoption of a Western implant has recently What conditions make it possible to break been challenged by a number of rival inter- out of an agrarian-coercive system to capi- pretations. One argument,focusing on Asian talist growth? The fullest picture of these in- economic growth in the late twentieth cen- stitutional requirements and their corre- tury, holds that capitalism is compatible with sponding obstacles in traditional structures AN

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