Ming-Ch’ing Studies in Japan: 1978

MING-CH'ING STUDIES IN JAPAN: 1978 Miki Satoshi 2 > "Min-Shin” l£) , Shigaku zasshi Ijffeb?..volume 88, number 5 (May 1979), 220-28. Translated by Joshua A. Fogel, Columbia University. (Translator's note: This piece is a translation of the Ming-Ch'ing section of the annual summary of Japanese historical literature published each May by Shigaku zasshi. For technical terms, especially in socio-economic history, I have made frequent use of Hoshi Ayao's Chugoku shakai kei2ai shi goi , Toyo bunko, 1966, and its zokuhen , 1975, indispensible reference sources brought to my attention by Bin Wong of Harvard University.) Ming-Ch'ing historical studies began in the post-war period with the common theme of overcoming the "theory of stagnation." With studies of commodity pro­ duction and the landlord system aimed at elucidating the developmental nature intrinsic to pre-modern society, studies of peasant struggles that directly trace the independent growth of the small peasant stratum as one of those develop­ ments, and studies of the taxation and corvee systems that seek the link between the social substructure and the despotic state, a major result attained has been a theory of .the local gentry aimed at locating their historical significance over the period of social upheaval from the late Ming through the early Ch'ing. In the process, a number of essays this year have put forth views critical of more popular or widely accepted opinions, and raised extremely interesting issues. These essays are concerned with a basic understanding needed for a theoretical grasp and overall historical picture of the Ming-Ch'ing period. They show that we have reached a turning point from prior Ming-Ch'inq historical research. Let us begin with agricultural management and the land system. In 1976, Adachi Kei ji f u equals 1.60 meters. See Shinjigen , ed. Ogawa Tamaki * 1 *)»|5 ^ ^ ? ^ • Nishida TaichirC # 0 * and Akazuka Tadashi (Tokyo: Kakugawa shoten, 1977), p. 1225. The best secondary discussion or these systems (mai-chia, ch *eng-chia, and kuo-t'ou) is Niida N o b o r u ^ ~ . Chugoku hosei shi kenkyu t i l J t f j s L (Tokyo; Tokyo University Press, 1950) toliune 2 (on land law and trans­ action l a w ) , pp. 183-85 — JF. 79 the tenants; but, how then do we understand statements such as "'landlords them­ selves paid to have dikes constructed1" and '"allocate payment according to the size of one's landholding1" which appear in the Li-p'ai kung-chu chih of the C h ’ien-lung period? Furthermore, the link between systems of sand flat colonization and landlord-tenant relations should be made clear. One cannot but feel that on the whole Kusano's grand conceptual scheme has preceded his evidence. In the past, studies in social and economic history linked various phenomena to theories of stages of development or theories of economic structure, but in­ vestigations of the "concrete economic background" that brought about these phenomena remained incomplete. With this in mind, Nakayama Mio ("Secular Trends in Rice Prices in Kiangnan During the First Half of the Ch'ing" f«7 « Shigaku zasshi 87.9) pioneers in the field of commodity price history as an effective means to clarify the overall picture of economic fluctuations. She analyzes with precision the utility of the history of pre-modern commodity prices, rejects statistical techniques based solely on numbers as a research method, and advocates grasping the trends in commodity prices through the numerous writings of contemporaries that reveal how they actually felt. In this piece, she traces closely the trend in rice prices from the late Wan-li reign until the mid-ch'ien-lung period. She points out that the rise and fall of rise prices was not simply the result of natural phenomena but was tied into the booms and slumps of overall economic activity. Two acticles concerned with village community t m m deal with lands protected by e m b a n k m e n t s ^ ® in Kiangnan: Hamashima Atsutoshi > "Irrigation Practices in the Kiangnan Delta in the First Half of the Ming: A Reinvestigation of the T'ien-t'ou System ‘ Q ' ” (Shicho » N...