Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China and Europe

Historically, people have obtained goods and services through various means for sustaining and reproducing their economic lives. Although market transactions have taken a central position in the present economy and historical research has tended to stress this feature considering the interest in economic growth, we must consider the possibly significant roles of non-market activities to grasp the entire picture of people’s lives in both the past and the modern world. How did people tackle issues that the market did not handle well? To what extent did their approach to finding solutions to economic challenges reflect their political and social institutions as well as the structure of their economy? The present volume explores these questions by investigating efforts regarding the provision of “public goods” in early modern economies from the perspective of comparative socio-economic history.
 
The concept of “public” in this volume denotes the sphere in which people obtain goods and services for their lives through neither market transaction nor direct provision based on “personal” relationships. The latter include the relationship between a lord and his subjects as well as family or kinship ties. This concept of publicness is defined in contrast to the “market” as well as “personal” relationships, not in relation to the specific characteristics of providers such as government or state. In fact, this volume considers non-marketed goods that involved the government as one of several actors. Quite a few goods and services were supplied in early modern societies by various kin groups, communities, lords, and governments to sustain and reproduce the economic lives of ordinary people. By taking up the following three fields—all of which were apparently essential for sustaining and reproducing people’s economic lives in the early modern economy—this volume relativizes the role of states and the market/state dichotomy emphasized in the present literature.
 
This book invites the reader to first learn some basic practices responsible for public goods provision in early modern Japan and then takes them through three substantive areas of activity—poor and famine relief, infrastructure building, and forestry management, leading with Japanese examples and providing both European and Chinese examples for comparison. We take advantage of the rich scholarship on the Tokugawa era (1603–1868) to take Japanese public goods provision as our benchmark case. Part I provides a concentrated introduction to Japanese practices to help readers form the frame of reference for considering poor relief, infrastructure, and forest management in Parts II–IV. Through this volume, we propose a baseline for approaching the question of how the structure of public goods provision in the early modern economy affected the diversity in public goods provision by the modern state, and to what extent.

(Written by TANIMOTO Masayuki, Professor, Graduate School of Economics / 2020)