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December 1995 Early Modern Japan

KarenWigen) Duke University

The aims of this paperare threefold: (I) to considerwhat Westernhistorians mean when they speakof Early Modern Japan,(2) to proposethat we reconceivethis period from the perspectiveof world networks , and (3) to lay out someof the advantagesI believe this offers for thinking aboutSengoku and Tokugawasociety.

The idea that Japan had an is gradually becoming common in every sector of our field, from institutional

to history. Yet what that means has rarely been discussed until now, even in the minimal sense of determining its temporal boundaries: I want to thank David Howell and James Ketelaar for raising the issue in this forum, prompting what I hope become

an ongoing conversation about our practices. To my knowledge, the sole attempt in English to trace the intellectual genealogy of this concept is John Hall's introduction to

the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of Japan-a volume that he chose to title Early Modern Japan. Hall dates this expression to the 1960s, when "the main concern of Western scholars of the period was directed toward explaining Japan's rapid modernization."

Its ascendancy was heralded by the 1968 publication of Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, which Hall co-edited with Marius Jansen. "By declaring that the Tokugawa period should be called Japan's 'early modern' age," he reflects, "this volume challenged the common practice of assuming that Japan during the was still fundamentally feudal.") Although Hall sees the modernization paradigm as having been superseded in later decades, he nonetheless reads the continuing popularity of the early modern designation as a sign that most Western historians today see the Edo as "more modern than feudal.',4 This notion is reiterated in even more pointed terms by Wakita Osamu in the same volume. "One particularly prominent and powerful idea" among Western historians of Japan, Wakita writes, "has been to use the term 'early modern' to refer to the kinsei period, thus avoiding the Marxist categories of analysis favored by many Japanese and, at the same time, drawing attention away from the period's feudal

aspects and toward those long-term trends related to the emergence of the modern Japanesestate and economy after 1868.',5

1. Many thanks to the colleagues, students,and friends who have shared their thoughts on the subject of early , especially Philip Brown, Andrew Gordon, William Hauser, David Howell, Martin Lewis, Henry Smith, Andre Wink, the Early Modern Japan Network, the Early Modern History Workshop at Madison, and the Geographical Perspectivesin Asian History seminar.Thanks also to Kris Troost for sharingher internetexpertise and for help in tracking down sources. 2. This standsin stark contrast to the situation in Meiji studies, where the problem of what modernity meansin the Japanese context,and when it began,have beencentral concernsat least sincemid-century. While the Meiji debatehas importantimplications for understandingwhat we are here calling early modernity, an analysis of tho'seconnections lies outside the scopeof the present essay. 3. Hall 1991:33. 4. Hall 1991:8-9. 5. Wakita 1991: 98. Volume 5 Number 2 2 Early Modern Japan

A glancethrough recent bibliographies in the field confirms that the Edo period as a whole is seldom referred to anymoreas FeudalJapan (even if the political order of the time is still "habitually and haphazardly"characterized that way6).It is also interesting that, in the early 1970s,a few Tokugawascholars who identified their subjectas "pre-modem"began to do so in quotationmarks: But is the growing preferencefor "early modem" best understoodiif'Hall's and Wakita's terms?The evidence is ambiguous at best. Consider the half-dozen books on Japan published in the last twenty years that feature the words Early Modern. in their titles.8 Togetherthey spana wide range of topics, from early Tokugawadiplomacy9 to late Tokugawaideology, 10 from travef I to disease,12

and from a broad but environmentally anchoredsurveyl3 to an anthology on Edo and Paris.14The last volume fits Hall's paradigm nicely (the editorsexplicitly identifying both cities as "capitals of absolutism"ls),but the other five formulate their problems in terms that seemto eschewthe feudal/moderndichotomy altogether.16And the range of casualusage is wider still. When people like Harry Harootunianand David Howell call the Tokugawa period "early modem",I?can this choice of words meaningfully be read as an

attemptto avoid Marxian categoriesof analysis? This is not to suggestthat the echoesof 1960sscholarship that Hall hearsin the words Early Modem Japanhave faded away entirely. On the contrary, it is precisely for its perceivedassociations with a Weberian model of modernization that the expression attractsone group of scholarsl8while provoking resistancefrom another.I was unawareof this resistanceuntil I raisedthe issueon the Early Modem JapanNetwork this spring. To my surprise,some colleaguesresponded that they find the whole notion distastefully teleological, hearing in it a sounding of the past for the outlines of a proto-present!9 Others objected that it has inescapably Eurocentricovertones, calling to mind such Westerndevelopments as the rise of the absolutiststate, the spreadof secularthought, the I

6..Totman 1993:49, n. 12. 7. Sheldon1971, R. Smith 1972,T. Smith 1973. 8. To my knowledge,the only book to date other than thosediscussed here that employs this designationin its title (asidefrom thosementioned above [Hall and Jansen1968 and Hall 1991]) is GeorgeElison's earlier Deus Destroyed:The Image of in Early ModernJapan [1973]. If readersare awareof othersI have overlooked,I would be grateful for the correction. 9. RonaldToby's Stateand in Early Modern Japan: in the Developmentof the TokugawaBakufu [1984]. 10. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi'sAnti-Foreignism and WesternLearning in Early Modern Japan: The New Thesesof 1825

[1986]. 11.Constantine Vaporis's Travel and the Statein Early Modern Japan [1994]. 12.Ann BowmanJannetta'sEpidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan [1987]. 13.Conrad Totman's Early Modern Japan [1993]. 14.James L. McClain et at, Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the Statein the Early Modern Era [1994]. 15.McClain, Merriman,and Ugawa 1994:11.The temporalframework of the volume is specifiedin termsof political developments as "the period from the 1590s,when the Bourbonsand Tokugawarose to power, until the 1780sand 1790s,when the monarchyfell and the collapseof the Kansei reforms marked the beginning of severaldifficult decadesthat culminated in the "

(xvii). 16.Although I have not done a comprehensivesearch, the only discussionof feudalismthat I have discoveredin thesebooks is a footnotein ConradTotman's textbook, noting that he and others have long preferredto characterizethe polity as neither feudal nor . ' absolutIstbut 'federal.' Totman 1993:49,n. 12.Totman refers to the periodizationissue only in passing,noting that the yearsbetween 1568and 1868are "commonly called Japan'searly modernperiod" (1993:xxv). 17.Harootunian 1988:1; Howell 1994, 1995:3. 18. See,for instance,Bodart-Bailey 1989;Whit~ 1988. 19. To be sure, researchin the roots-of-modernizationmode is still well representedin the field, as suggestedby the title of Akira Havami's recentbook, Pre-conditionsto Industrializationin Japan (1986). December 1995 Early Modern Japan 3 growth of cities, the expansionof mercantilecapitalism, and the like:o The searchfor suchrandom parallels,some argue, ignores the distinctivenessof the Japanesecultural milieu:! Judgingfrom a preliminary survey of current writing in the field, however (as well as from someother suggestivecomments on the internet), 1 am persuadedthat most of us who use the l~ution Early Modern Japanhave somethingrather different in mind. While this expressionmight once have suggesteda particular historiographicaltake on Japaneseinstitutions, it no longer necessarily t functionsas a code-wordin this way-primarily becausethe debateto which Hall refers is no longer compelling acrossthe broadfield of Japanesehistorical studies.In most cases,the viable choice for designatingour temporallocus of interestis not "the feudalperiod," but the Sengoku,Tokugawa, or Edo period:2 Given this set of alternatives,the salient featureof early modern is its cosmopolitanism. By locating our work in a chronology that has relevanceoutside Japan,it seems,what we are really doing is staking our intellectual claims on a wider terrain than that of Japanesestudies. To the extent that this expressionremains a code word in our field in the 1990s, what it signalsto me is a desireto transcendparochial boundaries and to engagewith other (and other historians).23 Traditionally, the major way to do that has been through referenceto Europeananalogies or universal models (the latter usually generalizedfrom Europeanexperience). Comparative work in this vein is often provocative and widely read-despite wary reactionsfrom "suspiciouspeople" (as Ashin Das Gupta calls his camp).24The other way to engagewith historiansoutside one's own field, of course,is by exploring cross-cultural linkages. But linkage-history has traditionally been the province of those who study diplomacy, trade, migration, missions, and the like-subjects with an obvious international dimension. It is less often considered relevantfor thosewho work at the national and local levels. The conversationsthat have beenformative for my own thinking about early modernity, however,effectively fuse thesetwo approaches,situating comparisons within a highly-developedmap of cross-culturallinkages. This methodhas yielded a relatively new sub-disciplinethat might be called "world networks history": "world" to suggesta trans-oceanicreach, "networks" to highlight an

20. It would appearthat the more energeticdebate over early modernity in Chinesestudies has been largely influencedby this kind of an agenda.According to Antonia Finnane's recent assessment,"the chronology of and modernity in China remainsa more or less disputed point. Evidence of commerce,the so-called 'roots of ,' urbanization,increasing literacy, voluntary associations,and so on--in brief, the trappingsof a civil ~an all be drawn upon to supportthe notion of an 'early modernChina' emergingaround the sixteenthto seventeenthcenturies (Rawski 1991; Feuerwerker1992). Parallel argumentscan be mountedin the sphereof arts and letters, with Elman positing the emergenceof evidential as the decisiveconjuncture in late imperial history, and Vinograd's researchon the rise in portrait painting suggestingthe discovery of the autonomousself (Elman 1990; Vinograd 1992). Related observationson the integration of the Chinese economy and can be used to suggestthe existenceof a nation in China pre-datingthe ageof nationalism(cf. Duara 1993:2-9)." Finnane 1994: 1161. 21. John Hall himself has repeatedlyvoiced strong objectionsto the application of European-derivedmodels to Japanesehistory, but he clearly does not find such models to be implicit in the early modern concept.For instance,the introduction to Japan Before Tokugawa:Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500 to 1650 (edited by Hall, NagaharaKeiji, and Kozo Yamamura) assertsflatly that "most of the institutional end productsof the sixteenth-centuryrevolution ... were idiosyncratic to the point that the useof the Europeananalogy or any generalmodel basedon Europeandata for analytical purposesis more apt to distort than to assist in his effort to understandtheir meaning" (Hall, Nagahara,and Yamamura 1981: 15-16). The sameessay glosses the Japaneseterm kinsei as "early modern" (p. 11). , 22. "Preindustrial" is also sometimesused in socio-economiccontexts; e.g., llanley and Yamamura1977. 23. In practice, the "other histories" where an early modern period is invoked are limited to western , , SoutheastAsia, Japan,and increasingly China (although "late imperial" is more commonly used to identify thesecenturies in the Chinesepast). Historians of and the rarely identify an early modern period in those continents' histories, favoring insteadthe termsprecolonial (or pre-Columbian)and colonial. 24. Das Gupta 1985:485. 4 Early Modern Japan Volume 5 Number 2 emphasis on patterned interactions, and "history" to underline a concern with the formation and transformation of these socio-spatial interactions over time:5 Early modernity in this literature is characterized, not in terms of a European paradigm or universal model of development, but as a particular configuration of global relationships: one brought about by new modes of , finance, and weaponry in the fifteenth century, and brought to an end by the awearance of still more potent of power at the beginning of the last century. At the risk of oversimplification, the early modern configuration could be said to have. been created by the gunpowder revolution circa 1450 and superseded by the spread of industrial capitalism and European imperialism after 1800. But this set of markers is more suggestive than definitive. In practice, the temporal boundaries identified as bracketing the early modern period vary by as much as a century either way, depending on the domain in question.

The global on early modernity has been most fully articulated in the burgeoning field of studies:6 Nor is this surprising, since the Indian Ocean-as "the hub of world trade in early modern times,,27-was radically altered by, and contributed in singular ways to, the formation of the networks. But crucial contributions have been made by historians of other places and topics as well. Among the most important are studies of the gunpowder revolution,28 the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English commercial ,29the much-disputed "seventeenth-century crisis,',30the intercontinental exchange of food crops and diseases,3!the nomadic empires of ,32the Chinese and other trading diaspora,33and the circulation of precious metals and other monetary media.34As this (admittedly idiosyncratic) list suggests, world networks historians to date have been largely preoccupied with and political economy, most especially with military and monetary history. Guns and silver were, after all, the leading edge that sliced through long-standing regional boundaries.35Yet cultural and intellectual developments are being fruitfully reexamined from a world networks perspective as well.36

25. I prefer this formulation both to the world systems vocabulary of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), which is rooted in a mechanistic paradigm, and to Philip Curtin's "comparative " (Curtin 1984), which does not convey the centrality of cross-cultural linkages. Michael Mann's (1986) insistence that socio-spatial networks of power constitute the essential units of analysis for comparative historical has been formative for my conceptual vocabulary. 26. The sources I have found most stimulating are Chaudhuri 1985; Perlin 1983; Reid 1988, 1993a, 1993b; Subrahmanyam 1990; and Lieberman 1993a-a very modest sampling of a vast literature. 27. Wink 1993:106. 28. Hodgson 1974; McNeill 1982; Parker 1988, 1991; Tilly 1990; Downing 1991. For a useful review of the literature, see Lynn 1991 29. Braudel1979;Parry 1981[1974]; Tracy 1990, 1991;Flynn 1991. j I

30. Again, the literature is vast; of most relevancefor Japanesehistorians is the Modern Asian Studiesforum on the seventeenth- I centurycrisis in Asia (Atwell 1990,Richards 1990, Reid 1990,Steensgaard 1990). 31. McNeill 1977.;Crosby 1972, 1986. 32. Fletcher 1985,Abu-Lughod 1989,Barfield 1989. 33. Curtin 1984,Blusse 1986,Wang 1990.See also Ownby and Heidhues1993. 34. Perlin 1986;Tashiro 1976, 1989;Richards 1983. 35. In a longer historical view, the "leading edge" may have been .,,!,olfgang Schivelbuschwrites that "in their cultural significancespices were wholly medieval... [yet] they existed like foreign bodie; in the medieval world, forerunnersof the loosened boundariesof moderntimes. The medievalspice trade had alreadydone away with narrow local borders." He goeson to speculatethat it would be rewarding "to study how long the processof 'reorientation,' so to speak,lasted, whereby [the Spaniards']lust for pepper wastransformed into one for preciousmetals." Schivelbusch1993:12. 36. The subject of the cross-culturalexchange of ideas is only now being brought into an explicit world-networks framework. For a surveyof the spreadof world religions to 1500that adoptsthis perspective,see Bentley 1993; for a bold thesislinking national December 1995 Early Modern Japan 5

Taken together,this corpusof work proposesa way to conceiveof early modernity as aglobal phenomenon,acknowledging Europeans'role without exaggeratingit or making it somehowparadigmatic. Research on Indian Ocean and China Seastrade, for instance, has made it clear that Europeansneither created nor quickly dominated exchange networks in that part of the world. Throughout the easternfour-fifths of , the newcomersremained dependentfor many decadeson local traders' capital and commercialexpertise, and were obliged to accommodatethenTselves to long-establishedconventions of exchange.Accordingly, the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies in southernand easternAsia have been pointedly characterizedas "the ~ge of commerce,.'!7or "the age of partnership,.'!8rather than "the age of conquest.,,39. At the sametime, work on earlier periodshas shown that the modernworld was not createdde novo by the new technologies of the fifteenth century. It is now widely acceptedthat both maritime and overland trade links were well establishedin earlier , bridging the whole of what Marshall Hodgsoncalled "the Afro-Eurasianecumene." The conventionalchronology suggeststhat early modemintegration was in part a revival of contactsthat had lapsedin the wake of the ,and that it representednot the first but at least the fourth major surge of pan-Eurasianinteraction in historical times.40Likewise, the agricultural, demographic,and commercialintensification that markedthis era is also understoodto havebeen under way for sometime before 1450.41 In short, world networkshistorians do not envision the fifteenth century as the sole or even necessarilythe greatestwatershed in history. One gets a senseless of a single "Great Transformation,,42than of a long, cumulative, and acceleratingseries of pulsesof intensification in cross-cultural exchange.Each reconstitution of the network has had its own distinctive contours,yet in generaleach peak of interaction has been higher than the last, and over time the relationshipshave becomeboth more extensiveand more complex.43 cultural standardizationthroughout Eurasia to the diffusion of fireanns and the creationof centralizedpolities, seeLiebennan 1993a. 37. Reid 1988, 1993a. 38. Pearsonand King 1979. 39. In SoutheastAsia, the tide had turned by the mid seventeenthcentury, and in South Asia by the late eighteenth,but in East Asia the balanceof power favored indigenousregimes until the mid nineteenthcentury. As Peter Klein puts it, "With the arrival of in Calicut on 27 May 1498 ...the Europeaneconomie-monde had somehowor other succeededin breakingthrough the spatial limits of its regional confinement. ... But did they really succeedas far as the maritime space of the China seasis concerned?It is my contention that they did not. At least not until after the middle of the nineteenthcentury when conditions had becomequite different." Klein 1989:64. For relatedviews seeBoxer 1969,Murphey 1977. 40. The previous three high-points of inter-Eurasiantrade coincided with the establishmentof stable, large-scalepolities across the continent during the era of the Han and Roman empires (2nd c BC - 2nd c AD), the early Medieval age (6th - 11th c), and the brief period of Mongol unification (ca. 1250-1350AD). See,e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989,Curtin 1988,Bentley 1993 (Frank and Gills [1993] arguethat similar pulsesof intercontinentalexchange can be tracedback to the ).Whether the Indian Oceancircuits shared in the otherwisewidespread decline of the fourteenthcentury in unclear;see Wink 1993. 41. This is suggested,for instance,by the "medieval agricultural revolution" in various parts of the world, and by evidencethat a growing demandfor monetarymedia preceded the greatflows of Japaneseand Peruviansilver into and China (on the latter, see Perlin 1986).I am indebted to Andre Wink for suggestingthat such developmentsrepresent a general secluarrise in the density of socialand economiclife acrossEurasia, the product of patient spadeworkthat beganwell before 1450. 42. cf. Hayami 1986. , 43. A cognate vision of Chinese history is propoundedby G. William Skinner (1985), whose synthetic vision I admire but whoseconceptual vocabulary I find uncongenial.For a more extendeddiscussion of Skinner's work on regional systems,see Wigen 1992:15-16. 6 Early Modem Japan Volume 5 Number 2

If one is justified nonetheless in singling out the fifteenth century as the beginning of the modem world, it is because of two roughly synchronous and immensely important discontinuities, One was the wholly unprecedented scope of long-distance contact, Not only did Western Europeans begin to turn up in and Malacca, bypassing numerous links in the established chains of exchange; at roughly the same time, they also stumbled onto the Americas. Only with the "discovery of the sea" in the !ate fifteenth century did the history of these two old worlds become entangled; only then did the global network begin to assume its nwdern dimensions.44The other momentous change of this era was the appearance of reliable and powerful firearms. In Victor Lieberman's words, the fifteenth-century military revolution "rapidly transformed the political equation throughout Eurasia." The new killing tools everywhere

"accelerated centralization by conferring an enormous cumulative advantage on the wealthiest, most innovative powers in each region--and, conversely, by raising the cost of warfare beyond the means of more local units",45 These two developments, then--a radical increasein the spatial scope of long-distance interaction, and a comparable leap in the spatial organization of social power-marked the onset of modernity, setting the stage for both the loosening of boundaries and the "time-space compression" that are the keynotes of modem life.46 This may be old news for historians of East Asia. Anyone who has been following the Asian studiesjournals over the past two decadeshas been party to much of this conversation,and some of our colleagueshave made important contributions to the literature.47Nonetheless, Japanese specialists are not yet very well representedin this discussion;it is mostly other Asianists who are doing the creativework of fitting Japaninto the emergingpicture of global early modernity.48Moreover, while our awarenessof this work may havechanged the way we talk about Hideyoshi's world in our survey courses,there is lessevidence that we considerglobal integration a relevant backdrop for, say, literature, or gender relations, or even urbanization.49For the bulk of the Tokugawa era, internationalissues (diplomacy, the silver trade) tend to be separatedfrom intra-national developments(everything else) as if there were an impermeablewall between them.soHow often is the gradual diffusion of the sweet potato mentioned in the context of Tokugawapopulation trends?) or the 1685 restrictions on silk imports considered in discussionsof protoindustrialization?52As

44. Di~.coveryof the Seais the title of J.H. Parry's celebratedstudy of navigation,mapping; and ship design in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies (Parry 198] (]974]). 45. Liebennan 1993a:527. 46. The notion of time-spacecompression is elaboratedin Harvey ]989, Part III. In Harvey's view, the dazzling, dismaying developmentsof financecapital in the] 980s (compoundedin the presentdecade by capital's forays into cyberspace)are but the latest roundin this continuingprocess, and might better be tennedhyper-modern than post-modern. 47. Notably Innes (]980), Toby (]984), Tashiro (]976, ]989), and Yamamuraand Kamiki (]983). Not surprisingly, all of these contributions discuss Japan's , and several focus on the export of silver and copper-undoubtedly the most importantlink betweenJapan and the wider world in this era. Japanesesilver is now estimatedto have constitutedover 30% of all new silver put into circulation betweenthe] 570s and the end of the seventeenthcentury; speakingprimarily of the copper that succeeded it, Anthony Reid writes that "the privileged accessof the VOC to Japaneseminerals after 1639 through its at Deshimawas critical to the successof the Dutch world-economyin Asia." Reid] 993a:288. 48. Perlin 1986,Parker ]988, F]ynn ]991, Liebennan ]993a, and Reid 1993aall discussJapan at length. 49. The Edo and Paris volume, for instance,while discoveringa remarkab]e'rangeof parallels in the two cities, essentiallytreats themas disjunct analytical subjects(Henry Smith's discussionof print technologyrepresenting an important exception).The editors' introductiondoes not discussthe internationalcontext in which Edo and Paris operated,and eventsthat radically altered that context (suchas the Tokugawaexclusion decrees) are not notedin the prefatory (xix-xxv). 50. The outstandingexception in recent years is China in the Tokugawa World (Jansen]992). A related study, analyzing the continuingengagement of Tokugawathinkers with both Chineseand Westernscience, is Sugimotoand Swain 1989. 51. SusanHan]ey's essayon material culture, in volume 4 of the CambridgeHistory of Japan, notes that "sweet potatoesmay December 1995 Early Modern Japan 7

valiantly as Ronald Innes,Ron Toby, and othershave tried to keepthe door ajar, not much light seemsto come throughfrom the other side beforethe 1540s or after the 1630s. Taking the cosmopolitanperiodization scheme of world networkshistory seriouslymight open up new questionsfor research. What might it mean to see the exclusion policies of the 163Q1;as less a unique Japanesephenomenon than part of a pan-Eurasian swing away from the trade peak of the late sixteenthand early seventeenthcenturiesf3 How might the rise"of. Neo-Confucianismand nativist thought be recast in light of evidence that international linkages in this period everywhere tended to nurture nationalistic reactions,promoting "exclusive and isolating" cultural orthodoxiesf4 Or, to hit closer to home, how might local historiesbe enriched if regional developmentwere viewed as inextricably relatedto the world acrossJapan's borders? Presumably, it should be possibleto perceiveechoes of global integration in the most disparateof social phenomena,at the most local of levels, long after the downscaling of internationaltrade. My own researchin southernShinano suggeststhat this is the case.The packhorsetrains and protoindustries that reshapedcentral Honshu's landscapesin the eighteenthcentury cannot be fully accountedfor without referenceto the long-term rhythmsof world networkshistory .55 Similar issuesmight be posedin the Sengokuperiod. To suggestthat Japan'sinvolvement in the early modernworld begins not in 1568or even 1543 but a full century earlier ought to raise new questionsabout everything from to culture in the "late medieval" period. For a hundred years before the Portugueselanded in Tanegashima,Japanese traders and piratesparticipated in the "Age of Commerce" heraldedby Zheng He's expeditions of the early 1400s.To some extent, we know that their exposureto "the mobile, commercial,competitive order of the early modernperiod/' worked to "loosen the controls" of an earlier age,contributing to the "entrepreneurial,fragmented, and competitive society" of SengokuJapan.56 But how might such linkages with the wider world (howevertenuous and fragmented)have impinged on, say, the spreadof a cross-class"national culture" (which BarbaraRuch traces to this period), or the "culture of lawlessness"in Kyoto (vividly evoked by Beth Berry)f7 How does it changeour perceptionof these and other Sengokudevelopments to think of the Onin as an early act in the moderntransformation of Japanf8 Thesequestions are simply meant to suggestthat a linkage perspectivecould shed light on specific topics in Sengokuand Tokugawahistory. But engagingseriously with world networks history could be of much broader significance for the field as well. What such an engagementoffers above all is a bracing corrective to the problem of de-contextualizedcomparative research. As Geoffrey Parker,Victor Lieberman,and othershave persuasively shown, trans-national relationships explain many of the cross-cultural isomorphismsat the national level that have long struck historiansof thesecenturies.59 The diffusion of firearmsand the appearanceof well havebeen an important in maintaining a densepopulation in Japanin the eighteenthand nineteenthcenturies" (1991 :682), but this is not followed up elsewhere;there is no sustainedanalysis of populationtrends in the volume. Totman devoteshalf a pageto the sweetpotato when discussingthe Kyoho Reform (1993:313),but doesnot mentionit in his treatmentof agriculturalintensification, demography,or famines. 52. Jansen(1992:39), following Innes,deems this "the greatestimport-substitution program of them all." 53. Reid 1993a,ch. 5; but seealso Lieberman 1993b,Pombejra 1993. 54. Lieberman1993a:531. 55. Wigen 1995. \ 56. Quotationsare from a descriptionof early modernSouth China in Ownby'and Heidhues1993:5,21. 57. Ruch 1990,Berry 1994. 58. For suggestiveanalyses of how quickly the Europeans'impact could reverberatebeyond the limited zoneof direct contactin the Americasand Africa, seeWolf 1982, Meinig -1989. 59. Parker 1988, 1991;Liebermana 1993. 8 Early Modern Japan Volume 5 Number 2

new forms of mobile wealth created similar problems and potentials for states from one end of Eurasia to the other. It is not coincidental that Japaneseresponses to those challenges bore structural resemblancesto responseselsewhere in the Eurasian rim-territorial integration,fiscal reform, an elaboration of commercialreticula, and the spreadof centrally-defined cultural norms

beingnotable among them.60 « At the sametime, a networks perspectivealso helps to illuminate what is peculiarly Japaneseabout . Early Modern Japan. Somelocal differences,of course, were simply the product of distinctive cultural legacies. To quote Victor Lieberman, "we are dealing with societieswhose convergences affected what were arguably superficial features(in somewhatthe sameway perhapsas fish and dolphins respondedto the same hydrodynamic imperatives with similar body shapeswhile remaining phylogenetically distinct).,~lYet the that Lieberman comparesto fish and dolphins did not swim freely about. Rather, they were tied to specific placeS-and the environment that shapedthem was not everywhere uniform. Each early modern society experiencedthe challengesof the agein a different way, dependingnot only on its distinctive cultural legacy but also on suchrelational considerations as who its neighborswere, whether it harboredresources that foreign merchantsdesired, its accessibility and defensibility given the technologicalconditions of the time, and the like.62A different set of relational issuesdifferentiated the experienceof early modernity from oneplace to anotherat the sub-nationallevel as well. In short, military technology and mercantile capital may have created similar imperatives over a broad terrain, but their operationwas still constrainedby the friction of distanceand by the contours of physical and social space.A keen senseof Japan's positionin the global trading world (and not just "Japan's," but Satsuma's,Edo's, Matsumae's,and so on) is thus indispensableif we would apprehendwhat was unique about Japaneseearly modernity without falling into purely culturalist explanations.As TosakaJun haswritten, "Japaneseness"itself "should be examinedas a concretelink in the chain of the internationalcontext.,~3 In this way, linkage-history serves not to displace but to discipline it, by subjecting comparisonsto thoroughcontextualization. To my mind, this is the single greatestadvantage it offers to the field. Easy analogiesmay misleading,but to eschewcomparison altogether would be to adopt a policy of defacto scholarly protection-ism,leaving us with no one to talk to but ourselves.64Only in dialoguewith historiansof other placescan we fully appreciatewhat was unusualabout Japan'sexperience-and graspthe magnitudeof Japan'sown contribution to the early modernworld.

60. For a richly suggestiveessay on the comparability of theseprocesses in WesternEurope, Russia,mainland SoutheastAsia, and Japan,see Lieberman 1993a,especially pp 521-540. Numerous analysts of early modern Japanesestate formation have been struckby the parallelswith Europeanabsolutism; see for instanceGrossberg 1981, Amason 1988,White 1988. 61. Lieberman1993a: 525. 62. For instance, historians of insular SoutheastAsia are quick to point out that not all Asian regimes had the option the Tokugawaexercised of minimizing and controlling Europeantrade. Sqmewere simply too exposedgeographically and too dependent on the income from exchange,lacking the sort of intensive agriculture and well-developed internal market that would have been requiredto survive after rebuffing the military-backed Europeantraders (Reid 1993a,ch. 5). Likewise, historians of the Spanish empirecan help us appreciatehow singular-and significant-it was that the Japanesehad copper to fall back on when their silver reservesran low (Flynn 1991). 63. TosakaJun 1966[1935]:292(Nihon ideorogi-ron, in Tosakafun zenshu,v~. 2 [Tokyo: Keiso shobo]), cited in Kawamura 1988:8. 64. It would also, I believe, representa betrayal of John Hall's true legacy. While his methodologicalessays repeatedly caution againstthe dangersof superficial analogies,those warnings grow out of a long-term engagementwith Europeanconcepts of . Likewise, while Hall insists on the uniquenessof Japaneseinstitutions, he managesto describethem in a vocabulary that is readily accessibleto non-specialists,as attestedby the regularity with which his work is cited in the world networksliterature.

~ December 1995 Early Modern Japan 9

Many people in this room may find a world networks agendaless compelling than I do. Sengokuand Tokugawahistorians are a diverselot, and our field is not likely to arrive at a consensusany time soonabout what early modernity means.But consensusis not necessary;it may not even be desirable.In the long run, we would probably be better servedby a protractedand passionatedispute over our periodizationpractices-just as Europeanhistorians ha"e benefittedfrom the long-runningdispute, over the seventeenth-century crisis. Although that debatewas never resolved,it serveda useful function: in the words of Niels Steen~gaard,it "demonstratedthe interrelations of Europeanhistory and broke the isolation of national studies. Every Europeanist working on seventeenth-century national history now is aware that his subject is a variation upon a general European theme and reflects and interrelates with developmentsin the rest of the continent.,,65If we are lucky, perhapsthe presentforum will initiate a similar movementin Japanese studies, In the meantime,I hope this paper has at least establishedthat the debateover periodization is as much about the spatial dimensionsof our work as about its temporalboundaries. What Steensgaardhas said of the seventeenth-centurycrisis could equally be said for early modernity: both conceptspose ''as much a problem of the spaceof history as of the time of history.,ti6The challengeI perceivein world networks literature is that of bringing the world back in-and therebyof putting Japanesehistory firmly on the map of the early modern world. Whether or not my colleaguesagree with this particular agenda,I hope they will at leastconcede with Das Guptathat "it is useful for suspiciouspeople to havesome general notions to sharpentheir suspicionson, and in the processa measure of understandingis not unlikely.,,67

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