Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  27. Singer, Edo, 26 (quotation), together with illustrations from a 1998 exhibition; ‘Regulations for villagers’ in Lu, Sources of Japanese history, I, 209–10.

  28. In 1634 Iemitsu persuaded a consortium of Nagasaki merchants to build the artificial island of Dejima (which means ‘Jutting-out island’) to house the Portuguese merchants. It covered 160,000 square feet and the Portuguese moved there two years later. After their expulsion, Iemitsu forced the Dutch to move there from their previous base at Hirado. A separate ‘Chinatown’ was completed in 1689, with housing for about 5,000 people (ibid., 77). For more on Iemitsu's regulation of foreign trade, see ch 3 above.

  29. Cooper, They came to Japan, 402, Antonio Cardim's account of the ill-fated mission of 1640; Kuroita, Shintei zōho kokushi taikei, XL, 217, Iemitsu's order of 8 Feb. 1641 to the Kyushu daimyō (from the Tokugawa jikki). Lu, Sources of Japanese history, 216–18, prints some sakoku edicts. Some have claimed that the Tokugawa ‘closed’ Japan and prohibited all foreign contact, but this is manifestly false: see Toby, ‘Reopening the question of sakoku’; and Innes, ‘The door ajar’.

  30. The proof provided by each household, carefully entered into ‘Religious Investigation Registers’ (Shūmon Aratame-Chō), and often annotated to show changes from the previous register, forms the best source on family structure generated anywhere in the early modern world: see Hayami, Population, family and society, 165–84.

  31. Called Tōshōgū because they honour Tōshō Daigongen, as Tokugawa Ieyasu became known after his death. Nikkō formed the cornerstone of a series of ceremonial complexes in and around Edo, mostly built by the same team of architects and craftsmen: see Coaldrake, Architecture and authority, 164–92; and Gerhart, The eyes of power, chs 3–4. Today, the ‘Tōshōgū League’ links the 130 or so shrines dedicated to Ieyasu's divinity and issues a newsletter.

  32. See Ooms, Tokugawa ideology, 129 (on Suzuki's Hobbesian views) and 131, quoting Suzuki, Banmin tokuyō [Right action for all] (1652).

  33. Ono, Enomoto Yazaemon, 35–6 and 137–8; Nagakura, ‘Kan'ei no kikin’, 75–8 (Minami-Otari village in modern Nagano prefecture).

  34. Kuroita, Shintei zōho kokushi taikei, XL, 258, 269–71, Iemitsu's orders of 1, 2, 8, 17, 22, 24 Feb., and 25 May 1642; Nagakura, ‘Kan'ei no kikin’, 75–8 (depopulation).

  35. Ibid., XL, 279–81, 285 and 287–8, Iemitsu's orders of 28 June, 8 and 14 July 1642, and 20 and 21 Aug. (edict with 19 articles); Diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch factories, VI, 128–9, entry for 2 Sep. 1642 (reporting information received from Ōsaka); Nagakura, ‘Kan'ei no kikin’, 80–5 (legislation); Toyoda, Aizu-Wakamatsu-shi, II, 157–8 (the revolt of 1642).

  36. White, ‘State growth’, 18–19 (restricting petitions); Fukuda, ‘Political process’, 55–8 (feuds); Bix, Peasant protest, xxii (‘organized flight’).

  37. Shiveley, ‘Sumptuary regulation’, 129: legislation from 1648 and 1649. The concern for underwear stems from concern that it allowed forbidden materials to be worn with little risk of detection. The laws are known as ‘Kei'an’ because Iemitsu issued them in the ‘Kei'an era’ (1648–52).

  38. Shiveley, ‘Sumptuary regulation’, 150–1 (laws for the hatamoto), and 152 (edict by Iemitsu).

  39. Details from Sasaki, Daimyō to hyakushō, 243–53; and Hall, Cambridge History of Japan, IV, 203–4 (loans).

  40. Kei'an Laws in Kodama and Ōishi, Kinsei nōsei shiryōshû, I, 35–40, summarized in Nakane and Ōishi, Tokugawa Japan, 41–2 (data collection noted in idem, 39–40); other measures from Yamamoto, Kan'ei jidai, 199–203; and Sasaki, Daimyō to hyakushō, 233–9. See also Shiveley, ‘Sumptuary regulation’, 153–5. That same year – 1649 – saw the issue in Russia of a far-reaching law code, immediately after a major crisis, that likewise regulated (among other things) agrarian society: the Ulozhenie (ch. 6 above).

  41. Vlastos, Peasant protests, 38–9, Instruction of Hoshina Masayuki to his district magistrates; and 39–41 (from a chapter entitled ‘The political economy of benevolence’).

  42. Hall, ‘Ikeda’, quotations from pp. 69–75. Ikeda's implicit assumption about a high rate of male literacy was not unreasonable: (see ch. 21 above).

  43. Howell, Capitalism, 33; Sasaki and Toby, ‘The changing rationale’, 285, Instruction by Ikeda Mitsumasa, 1657.

  44. Diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch factory, IX, 154 (10 Sept. 1646, the Nagasaki magistrates sent away Chinese crews ‘na de maniere der Tartaaren geschooren’ and told them ‘niet wederom te coomen, tenwaare als Chineesen’) and 167 (junks manned by men ‘alle geschooren’ also turned away on 16 Oct. 1646).

  45. Toby, State and diplomacy, 113, 119–39, 148; Hesselink, Prisoners from Nambu, 81–2. Iemitsu only abandoned frugality when it came to building: he spent prodigiously in the 1620s and 1630s not only on the Tōshōgū shrine at Nikkō and the Ninomaru palace at Kyoto, which still stand, but also on the castles at Edo, Nagoya and Osaka, all subsequently destroyed. See the list of his projects in Gerhart, The eyes of power, 148–9.

  46. See Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, IV, s. v. junshi (‘following their lord in death’). Pflugfelder, Cartographies of desire, 37–8, notes the reason for the regents' suicide.

  47. Berry, Japan, 32; see also Berry, ‘Public life’, 147–51.

  48. Ono, Enomoto Yazaemon 189–92, recorded many details of the plot and its suppression in his Memoranda. Sansom, History, III, 53–8, gives a concise account (and of another abortive rōnin plot in 1652). Statler, Japanese Inn, 74–95, provides a delightful reconstruction, observed from one of the postal stations on the highway between Edo and Kyoto.

  49. Viallé and Blussé, The Deshima Registers, XII, 16 (23 July 1651). The indiscreet interpreters also noted that ‘the example’ of Tokugawa Ieyasu ‘is still fresh in their memories. He had likewise been appointed guardian of the rightful heir, but his desire for the crown had driven him to kill the heir’, Toyotomi Hideyori.

  50. Ibid., XII, 296 (3 Mar. 1657). Edo Castle, with a perimeter of perhaps 10 miles, covered a far larger area in the Tokugawa era than today. The five-storey donjon (tenshudai) destroyed in the Meireki fire stood 167 feet high and was thus the tallest building in Japan. See the ground plan at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edo_Castle_plan_1849.svg

  51. Hayami, Economic history, 169, tabulates the products listed in the 1637 Kefukigusa. See also Hayami, Population, family and society, 42–51.

  52. White, Ikki, 281, noted that the central government often ordered local magistrates to punish protesters, but then itself punished the local magistrates who had allowed the ‘incidents of contention’ to occur. His conclusions rest on a study of almost 7,500 recorded ‘incidents of contention’ in Japan between 1590 and 1868.

  53. Hayami, Economic history, 30–1. The rest of this paragraph rests on Hayami's insights except for the ‘1945 tax rate’ analogy, for which I thank Mary Elizabeth Berry.

  54. See the convincing evidence for tax evasion presented by Brown, ‘Practical constraints’; and the examples of technological improvement in Nagahara and Yamamura, ‘Shaping the process’.

  55. Tokugawa, The Edo inheritance, 88; Viallé and Blussé, The Deshima Registers, XII, 345–6 (17–19 Mar. 1658).

  56. Ooms, Tokugawa ideology, 297–8.

  57. Hesselink, Prisoners from Nambu, 50–2, 62–4 and 101–2.

  58. Ikegami, Bonds of civility, 307; Kornicki, The book in Japan, 63–5 (street vendors), and 324–52 (Chikamatsu's play, Keisei Shimabara kaeru gassen). For more on censorship, see ch. 22 above.

  59. Berry, Japan, ch. 4, describes these rosters, known as Mirrors. On p. 122 she notes that, just as the timing of the rosters of nobles reflected Iemitsu's extension of the sankin kōtai system, so the appearance of the rosters of officials reflects Iemitsu's work in streamlining the Tokugawa administrative system.

  60. Nakane and Ōishi, Tokugawa Japan, 60–2, stress the enormous volume of surviving village documents.

  61. Ikegami, Bonds of civility, 300–2, quoting Mukashi gom
e mangoku tsū (1725). For examples of others who ‘managed to learn to read from experience’ in the seventeenth century, see ch. 18 above.

  62. Data from Kornicki, The book, 20; Berry, Japan, 31; and Ikegami, Bonds of civility, 286. Compare, however, the 100 to 150 new titles printed each year in Japan, a country of 17 million, with the 2,000 new titles printed in England, a country of fewer than 5 million, in 1642: ch. 11 above.

  63. Nakane and Ōishi, Tokugawa Japan, 119; Ikegami, Bonds of civility, 173, 181–2. Religious texts also predominated in seventeenth-century Europe.

  64. Ikegami, Bonds of civility, 298; Pflugfelder, Cartographies, 23 note.

  65. Lane, Images from the floating world, 11, quoting from Asai, Ukiyō monegatori [Tales of the floating world] (1661). Uki-yo was originally a Buddhist expression. Yo means ‘world’ and uki means ‘sorrow’, but with ‘floating’ as a homonym. The suffix -e means ‘pictures’.

  66. Ikegami, Bonds of civility, 142, from the Kyōhabutei. Berry, Japan in print, 1–12, offers a brilliant survey (with illustrations) of the guides and maps available to travellers (including, by 1700, some 200 maps of Tokyo).

  67. Viallé and Blussé, The Deshima Registers, XIII, 8–9 (2 Apr. 1661), 371 (4 Apr. 1663) and 247 (1 Apr. 1668). See Asai's graphic account of the tragedy at page 63 above.

  68. Totman, ‘Tokugawa peasants’, 464–5 and 467.

  Part IV. Confronting the Crisis

  1. Hobbes, On the citizen, 29; Anon., The moderator, 11; Vitrián, Las memorias, in Gil Pujol, ‘L'engany de Flandes’, 418; Pascal, Les Pensées, # 451.

  2. Bacon, Essayes, ‘Of seditions and troubles’, 47; Carroll, ‘The peace’, 76; Ludden, Peasant history, 8; Smith, Nakahara, 112, 115. This paragraph owes much to the insights of Thurow, Zero sum society.

  3. Beik, ‘The violence’, 77–8, 92; Sibbald, Provision for the poor (1699: quoted ch. 1 above).

  4. Des Forges, Cultural centrality, 176–7, quoting a memorial of Lü Kun to the Wanli emperor. In Italy, Giovanni Botero made a similar analysis at almost the same time (1589): see Villari, Baroque personae, 101–2.

  Chapter 17 ‘Those who have no means of support’

  1. Special thanks to John Walter for help in framing the argument of this chapter, and to him, Cynthia Brokaw, David Cressy, Stephen Dale, Kaan Durukan, Suraiya Faroqhi, Jane Hathaway and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for references.

  2. Bamford, Royalist's notebook, 60; Walter, Crowds, 69–70; Blickle, Aufruhr, 66–7 (Germany and Switzerland); Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, 682 (Aquitaine); Pillorget, Les mouvements, 988 (Provence).

  3. Des Forges, Cultural centrality, 198, quoting Zheng Lian's Outline history of the changes in Yu. See the figures and graphs in Tong, Disorder, 47–9; and Parsons, Peasant rebellions, 86–7. CHC, VII/1, 624–5, provides excellent maps of Late Ming popular revolts. See chs 6 and 15 above on Russia and Japan.

  4. Price, Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangueir, 225–6; Bercé, ‘Troubles frumentaires’, 789 and 777–8, Giuseppe Caetano and Alessandro Bini to Cardinal Panzirolo, 8 and 9 Aug. 1648.

  5. BNE Ms 2375/5–10v, ‘Relación del motín contra los Walones’, in May 1643. See also otherwise unreported ‘peasant furies’ listed in Jago, ‘The “Crisis of the Aristocracy”’, 79 (against the dukes of Béjar), and in Lorenzo Cadarso, Conflictos populares, 72 (against the dukes of Nájera).

  6. A. Domínguez Ortiz in Manuscrits, IX (1991), 263–4, in a ‘Round Table’ on the problems that faced the Spanish Monarchy in the 1640s; Calderón de la Barca, El alcalde de Zalamea, set in a village on the Portuguese front. Calderón himself served in the army that invaded Catalonia in 1640.

  7. Walter, ‘Public transcripts’, 128–9.

  8. Evans, Seventeenth-century Norwich, 113, from a petition to the Long Parliament by the mayor and council of Norwich; other details from Cressy, England on edge, 361–72 (which contain many other examples found in court records from 1640 to 1642).

  9. Ebrey, Chinese civilization, 160, quoting ‘Biography of Gentleman Wang’ of 1591 (Wang Daokun, Taihan ji).

  10. Bloch, Les caractères originaux, I, 175 (italics added); Scott, Weapons of the weak, xvi–xvii. See also Scott, The moral economy, and Domination and the arts of resistance.

  11. See Barriendos, ‘Climatic variations’ and ‘Climate and culture’ and page 423 above for example of self-blame. Chs 1 and 8 above note the tendency to blame witches and Jews.

  12. Nicolas, La rébellion, 223, offers a statistical analysis of grain riots on a national scale. In France between 1661 and 1789, over 1,500 riots, one-fifth of all those recorded, involved shortage of food. Of these, one-third involved pressure to establish a ‘fair price’ while almost half sought to prevent those trying to export local grain.

  13. Gutiérrez Nieto, ‘El campesinado’, 70, quoting a manuscript treatise; Chéruel, Lettres, I, 413–14, Mazarin to the Intendant of Guyenne, 11 Oct. 1643. See similar letters of the same date to other officials in the south-west, loc. cit., pp. 414–16. On Catalonia and Ulster, see chs 9 and 11 above.

  14. Lionti, ‘Cartelli’, 450–1, petition of Caltabellotta, 23 June 1647; Sella, Crisis and continuity, 54, quoting a farmer near Milan in 1631; Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, II, 657, Argenson to Séguier, 2 July 1644, visiting Poitou. In Ming China, too, abandoned land remained liable for tax arrears: see page 123 above.

  15. Bailey, ‘Reading between the lines’, 71, quoting Huang Liuhong's 1699 manual for magistrates, A complete book concerning happiness; Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, II, 548 n. 44, count of Jonzac to Chancellor Séguier, 12 Dec. 1643; and ibid., II, 550–62, 570–1. The incident at Abjat left excellent records because the family of the late captain, a local nobleman, sued the village for damages.

  16. Wood, ‘Subordination’, 66, and ‘Fear’, 810, stresses the extent of the humiliation required of poor petitioners, forced to plead in public on their knees and to use demeaning language. For the four factors, see Scott, Weapons of the weak, 242–8.

  17. Wood, ‘Subordination’, 63; Walter, Crowds, 58 (staying within the law) and 187 (‘no law now’); and ch. 5 above on the view that an interregnum meant the suspension of all laws in China too.

  18. Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, II, 543. One-fifth of the riots studied by Bercé involved only women; as did one-quarter of rural and one-third of urban bread riots studied by Nicolas (La rébellion, 269). I thank John Mueller for reminding me that ‘Chicks up front’ became a battle-cry in United States protests during the 1960s, because, as in the seventeenth century, law-enforcement officials were slightly less likely to use physical violence against females.

  19. Nicolas, La rébellion, 269–70. In the Dutch Republic (if not elsewhere), women also humiliated officials by raising their skirts and ‘mooning’.

  20. Dekker, ‘Women in revolt’, 343 (Haarlem); idem, Holland in beroering, 56–7 (Oudewater); Bennett, Civil wars experienced, 119 (Derby). See also Hugon, Naples, 82–4, on the role of women in the revolt of 1647–8.

  21. Dekker, ‘Women in revolt’, 344 (quoting the same slogan in riots of 1621 and 1691); Walter, Crowds, 41, quoting William Lambarde's Eirenarcha (1619 edition) and a case from Star Chamber. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1622) said the same; and Capp, Gossips, 312–18, provides similar quotations. Interestingly, Englishwomen lost their immunity when they went to New England, where they received severe punishment for breaking the peace: Westerkamp, ‘Puritan patriarchy’, and idem, Women and religion, 35–52.

  22. Tawney, Land and labour in China, 73, 77; Walter, Crowds, 44, quoting A briefe declaration concerning the state of the manufacture of woolls (1629); Nicolas, La rébellion, 281, quoting rioters in 1694, 1699 and 1709. See similar desperate views quoted in ch. 3 above, and two Spanish examples quoted on page 280 above.

  23. ODNB s.v. ‘Ann Carter’ by John Walter (Ann was the only Englishwoman known to have been hanged for participation in a food riot; we do not know her age, but she married in 1620 and so by the time of the riots was probably in her late 20s); D
ekker, ‘Women in revolt’, 351–2.

  24. Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, II, 548: ‘aux femmes les plus criardes’. On the prominent role of women in popular violence elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe, see chs 9 (Bilbao, Barcelona and Lisbon), 10 (Paris) and 14 (Palermo and Naples) above; and Beik, Louis XIV, ch. 6.

  25. Lindley, Fenland riots, 75, quoting a contractor's agent at Hatfield Level, 1626 (and 63 on the relative role of men and women); Simon i Tarrés, Cròniques, 269–70, account of Judge Ramon de Rubí; ch. 11 above on Scotland.

  26. TCD Ms 837/5–5, deposition of Elizabeth Croker, Co. Down, 15 Mar. 1643 (on Lady Iveagh); Ms 836/73–74, deposition of Ann Smith and Margaret Clark, Co. Armagh, 16 Mar. 1643, and Ms 836/87–90, Joan Constable, Co. Armagh, 6 June 1643 (on Jane Hampton, ‘formerly a Protestant, but a meere Irish woman and lately turned to Masse’). Ms. Croker signed herself only ‘Eliza’ while the other three women made their mark.

  27. TCD Ms 834/111, deposition of Martha Culme, Co. Monaghan, 14 Feb. 1642; Ms 832/80, deposition of Marmaduke Batemannson, gent., Co. Cavan, 14 Apr. 1643 (about Rose ny Neill); Ms 812/202–8, deposition of Joseph Wheeler, gent., and others, Co. Kilkenny, 5 July 1643 (about Alice Butler). They also accused Florence Fitzpatrick of hanging six named Protestants ‘and divers others’.

  28. Khan, ‘Muskets in the mawas’, 93, quoting Manucci, Storia do Mogor.

  29. In the nineteenth century, both the Taiping and Boxer rebels included female troops, but even then they played a subordinate role to male troops. Unlike their Chinese sisters, Indian women were prominent in the ‘Great Rebellion’ of 1857. I thank Cynthia Brokaw for help in formulating this paragraph.

  30. Pillorget, Mouvements, 564 (catechism of Avignon, 1633, reprinted at Aix-en-Provence, 1647); Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, II, 553 (entry by the curé in the baptismal register of Rocamadour, 1653). Both authors noted clerical involvement in other popular revolts; so did Foisil (for the Nu-Pieds of Normandy); and Nicolas, Rébellion, 92–6. Clerics also provided political as well as spiritual leadership in several European revolts: see ch. 18 below.