Page 220 - Changing Living Spaces

Satoshi Murayama, Hiroko Nakamura, Noboru Higashi and Toru Terao

The main objective of this chapter was to show new ways of compar-
ing Japan and pre-modern Europe by drawing on Fernand Braudel’s
three layers of economic life. This was done to broaden our understand-
ing of this phenomenon and its influences on early modern societies. In
Braudel’s words:
I wish, in particular, to stress that material life can be divided into
three levels. I see the market to be the equator. South of the equator is
the southern hemisphere, that is, bartering, and it is above the equator,
in the northern hemisphere, that we find capitalism. The southern hem-
isphere, that is, the level embracing bartering, is what is called ‘economia
sommersa’ (submerged economy) in Italian.1
Consistent with this comparative scheme, Saito Osamu (2005, 2015a;
2015b) extended comparative studies of pre-modern Europe and Japan
based on similarities observed in the ‘market’ layer and significant differ-
ences in the lower and upper layers, or at the level of household economy
and capitalism. This chapter focuses on this lower layer, which Braudel re-
ferred to as the ‘underground’ economy, and highlights the existence of
locally oriented ecological and climatological conditions that could deter-
mine the upper layers of the market economy and capitalism in the ear-
ly modern period.
European economic historians have long debated the origins of the
Industrial Revolution. Jan de Vries and others attempted to explain eco-
nomic development in terms of changes on the demand side (Hayami
2003; Vries 2008; Muldrew 2011; Vries 2013). Early technological develop-
ment in England and the Netherlands was stimulated by market demand
driven by people seeking to improve their standard of living. European
economic history is also characterized by a tremendous development of
‘capital’, such as mercantile capital and state capital. Neither could devel-
op in Japan because international trade did not exist due to a political de-
cision by the Tokugawa shogunate that isolated Japan from the rest of
the world, and the economy was sustained by a ‘rice-oriented’ local vil-
lage economy. In the absence of international trade, Japan achieved a lev-
el of early modern agricultural development, including market-oriented
production comparable to that of England. However, ‘Japan’s upper- and
middle-class layers were much thinner than those of its English coun-
terparts’, and ‘the “extent of the market” was smaller than in England’

1 Braudel (1986, 94) (translated from the original French text by Hiroko Nakamu-
ra).

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