著者

大島 真理夫

出版者

社会経済史学会

雑誌

社会経済史学 (ISSN:00380113)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.71, no.1, pp.61-78, 2005

参考文献数

33

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The 73rd annual meeting of the Socio-Economic History Society was held at Osaka City University on May 29 and 30, 2004. The general session was organized by Mario OSHIMA under the title shown above. The speakers took different approaches from those adopted in Japan so far to describe early modern economic history. They focused their views on the scarcity of land used for agriculture as a factor existing nearly everywhere in the world during this era. Industrious revolution, the term coined by Akira HAYAMI three decades ago, can be understood as farmers' efforts to overcome this resource constraint in rural Japan during the 18th and 19th centuries. Atsushi AOKI presented detailed research on four-character words representing land scarcity in formal Chinese histories and agricultural advisory documents issued by local governments, finding the constraint intensified already in the 11th and 12th centuries. Akihiko ETO presented evidence showing that 17th-century Japan still had land available for rice cultivation, which was much needed because of the big spurt of castle-town construction and the development of silver/gold mines aimed at obtaining foreign exchange; however, the country faced resource constraints during the latter half of the century. Takashi IIDA, basing his detailed study on Mark Brandenburg, pointed out that the sharp division between the full farmer class and cottagers in 18th-century eastern Elbe, Germany, intensified as population and agricultural production grew. Tsuneyuki DOHI and Atsuko OHASHI presented comments from the Russian and East Asian perspectives, respectively.