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Mortgaging the Rice Fields
Peasant Debt and Rural Power in Late Edo Japan

Book Details
About this book:

Mortgaging the Rice Fields Beneath the tranquil veneer of Tokugawa Japan lies a feverish world of clandestine mortgages, rice‑field pledges, and village credit networks that quietly dismantled feudal order from within. *Mortgaging the Rice Fields* peels back centuries of myth to reveal how peasants—far from passive serfs—crafted sophisticated financial instruments to survive famine, market swings, and shogunal edicts that forbade the very act of selling their land.

Through thousands of surviving mortgage deeds, debt registries, and court petitions, the book reconstructs the mechanics of rural lending: conditional land pawns, shadow tenancy, women’s guarantees, and the five‑household liability groups that bound entire communities together. It shows how climate shocks, urban demand for cash, and the rise of wealthy peasants turned the rice paddy into both a lifeline and a trap, sparking petitions to magistrates, secret forged deeds, and even rebellions that burned debt ledgers.

By following the ink on fragile mulberry parchment, readers witness an economic revolution forged not in the Meiji Restoration but in the wet clay of Edo paddies—one that laid the legal, financial, and class foundations for Japan’s rapid march into modernity. This is the untold story of how ordinary farmers, armed with brush‑and‑ink contracts, reshaped the balance of power and set the stage for the nation’s capitalist awakening.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Land Beneath the Shogun: Property and Tenancy in Edo Japan
  • Chapter 2 Parchment and Seals: Reading the Village Mortgage Deeds
  • Chapter 3 The Illusion of Inalienability: Shogunal Prohibitions on Land Sales
  • Chapter 4 Pawning the Harvest: The Mechanics of Rice Field Pledges
  • Chapter 5 Village Moneylenders: Merchants, Headmen, and Local Gentry
  • Chapter 6 The Currency of Survival: Cash, Grain, and Credit Networks
  • Chapter 7 Seasons of Distress: Climate Shocks and Sudden Indebtedness
  • Chapter 8 Foreclosures and Dispossession: How Smallholders Lost Their Soil
  • Chapter 9 Shadow Tenancy: Cultivating the Land You Once Owned
  • Chapter 10 Family Strategies and Lineage Survival in the Debt Trap
  • Chapter 11 Women of the Household: Dowries, Guarantees, and Signatures
  • Chapter 12 The Five-Household Group: Mutual Surveillance and Shared Liability
  • Chapter 13 Village Autonomy and the Resolution of Default Disputes
  • Chapter 14 Petitions to the Magistrate: When Rural Debt Entered Shogunal Courts
  • Chapter 15 Usury, Custom, and Morality: Village Ethics of Borrowing
  • Chapter 16 The Rice Brokers of Osaka: How Urban Capital Reached the Countryside
  • Chapter 17 Famines and Forgiveness: The Politics of Debt Cancellation Edicts
  • Chapter 18 Secret Pawns and Forged Deeds: The Underworld of Rural Finance
  • Chapter 19 Agrarian Capitalism in the Making: The Rise of Wealthy Peasants
  • Chapter 20 Rural Unrest: Peasant Rebellions and the Destruction of Debt Registries
  • Chapter 21 The Tempo Era Crises: Economic Strains on the Eve of Transition
  • Chapter 22 Silk, Sake, and Cash Crops: Diversifying Out of Rice Debt
  • Chapter 23 The Quiet Reshaping of Village Hierarchy
  • Chapter 24 Crumbling Foundations: Rural Credit and the Late Tokugawa Order
  • Chapter 25 Legacies of the Deed: From Edo Pawns to the Meiji Land Tax Reform
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Author:

Pamela K. Sullivan

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Date Published:

September 12, 2026

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