Economic growth and changes in elite power structures in medieval Japan, 1150--1500

This dissertation analyzes the use of money and its impact on elite institutions in Japan between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Although the Japanese imperial court had produced its own copper currency in the Nara and early Heian periods, by the tenth century people relied primarily on rice and silk for use as media of exchange. From the twelfth century onward, however, merchants began importing large quantities of Chinese copper coins. Those coins, together with newly emerging regional markets, spread throughout the countryside and facilitated increased levels of trade, intra-regional exchange, and general economic growth. Although scholars have tended to see that growth as a by-product of political disintegration among ruling elites, this dissertation contends that economically empowered non-elites contributed to the political dissolution as much as they benefited from it.;Each chapter highlights a different way in which traditional institutions of elite rule proved unable to control economic developments in the countryside. Members of the nobility, seeing foreign coins as an affront to their political authority, attempted unsuccessfully to ban Chinese currency. In the provinces, estate managers and peasants found new opportunities to sell agricultural surplus and demanded that estate proprietors allow them to convert their in kind tax obligations into cash payments. The warrior government in Kamakura also struggled to handle the monetary problems of its retainers, and traveling merchants developed their own institutions for long-distance money remittance in the absence of centralized state authority. These developments were crucial to the disintegration of the shoen estate landholding system, the rise of independent villages in the later medieval period, and the emergence of sengoku daimyo warlords who used new approaches to harness medieval economic power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.