著者

吉村 仁作

出版者

公益財団法人 史学会

雑誌

史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.86, no.11, pp.1563-1596,1690-, 1977-11-20 (Released:2017-10-05)

---

This article is intended to examine the basic agrarian policy executed in the end of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century in the Shonai clan, and through it to throw light upon the characteristics of the social structure of the rural community at the period. The Shonai clan at that period, especially in the end of the 18th century when the Kansei Reform was started, saw the devastation of the rural community so terrible that an expression of a "structural crisis" is given to it. The devastation was concretely shown in the collapse of agriculture management under the severe exploitation, the joint management by the village community of the lands whose occupiers ran off, the exploitation by the usurious capital, the yoke of the organization for tax collection, the accumulation of land by landowners, and so on. The clan confronted with those problems tried to restore the village community by the adjustment of the government organization, the reorganization of the mercantile and usurious capitalists, the policy of land redemption, that is the one of settling occupiers on their lands, and so forth. The social structure of the village community at that period was characterized by the joint operation of deserted lands according to the village customs (mura-sozukuri) and the landowner-tenant relations through the village community. Both were the two manifestations or ways of the same conflict in the village social structure. The policy of settling occupiers on their lands was the basic policy adopted in the reform for maintaining the system of the peasant proper (hon-byakusho). The policy was intended to meet the conflict in the village, but at the same time it could not help being restricted by the village customs. The peasantry had "struggles" by relying upon the customs, and this was the basic form of class conflict at this period. Therefore, however, the decisive aggravation of class conflict waited till the closing years of the Bakufu and the Restoration period when the village community began to gravely disintegrate and reorganize itself. And the trend of poor peasants with various forms of existence in landowner-tenant relations can be used as an index of the aggravation of class conflict.