Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain

This book explores the historical roots of economic nationalism within Japan. By examining how mercantilist thought developed in the eighteenth-century domain of Toas, Luke Roberts shows how economic ideas were generated at the regional level. During the Edo period (1600-1867), Japan was divided into over 230 competitive states, many of which wished to reduce the dominance of the shogun's economy. The seventeenth-century Japanese economy was based on samurai notions of service - especially the duty performed by the dominal lord to the shogun - and the rhetoric of political economy that centred on the lord and the samurai class. This 'economy of service, ' however, led to crises in deforestation and land degradation, government fiscal insolvency and increasingly corrupt tax levies, and finally a loss of faith in government.