Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade

Originally published in 1974, this volume deals with economic and social change in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan, by means of a case study of the cotton trade in Ōsaka and the surrounding Kinai region. The development of the Ōsaka cotton trade is studied to illustrate the growth of new kinds of commercial institutions to regularize trading patterns and the changing interaction between merchant groups and the Tokugawa bakufu. A picture is presented of the changing interactio...