Originally published in 1974, this volume deals with economic and social change in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan, by means of a case study of the cotton trade in Osaka and the surrounding Kinai region. The development of the Osaka cotton trade is studied to illustrate the growth of new kinds of commercial institutions to regularize trading patterns and the changing interaction between merchant groups and the Tokugawa bakufu. A picture is presented of the changing interaction between urban and rural merchants and the ability of cotton cultivating villages to organize and contest urban merchant and governmental attempts to limit their commercial activities. The result is a revised interpretation of the effective coercive powers of the Tokugawa bakufu with respect to socio-economic change. Evidence is offered to illustrate the ability of urban and rural traders to assert their own interests in opposition to Tokugawa efforts at economic controls.

This volume analyzes the recurring form of warrior government known as the Bakufu (or shogunate) that ruled Japan for nearly 700 years. All the essays in this collection clarify aspects of Japanese political tradition that have been neglected by Western writers, and point out alternatives to already stated views.