The Japanese economy grew during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). It may even have grown “intensively”—that is, faster than the population, meaning that the average person's standard of living rose over the course of the era. Intensive economic growth was exceptionally rare anywhere in the world before the nineteenth century, when industrialization and capitalism transformed the global economy. Given its importance to comparative world history, it is surprising that the Tokugawa economy has not attracted more scholarly interest, particularly in the Anglophone world.
The problem may be the persistence of a set of images about Tokugawa economic thinking—that profligate samurai authorities disparaged merchants as parasites and commerce as immoral, and saw peasants as so many sesame seeds to be squeezed for all they were worth. Even without going so far, it is easy to see Tokugawa economic thought as essentially conservative, even hidebound, and to attribute whatever economic growth there was...
