GoKawiilCities are often centers of agglomeration, places where people gather to collaborate with one another. But this is not the only reason they exist. Sometimes, cities are chiefly centers of consumption, where elites gather to devour resources extracted from the rest of the country. And occasionally, they are something like prisons, where troublesome social groups are concentrated so that the authorities can keep an eye on them. Many premodern cities, like Versailles, Naples, or Imperial Rome, were a little like this. But perhaps the greatest example was Tokugawa Edo.
Between 1600 and 1868, Japan was dominated by the Tokugawa family. The Tokugawas had prevailed over their rivals after a series of civil wars, establishing a sort of dictatorship known as the Shogunate. They developed a remarkable social system, crafted to preserve their power, and with it, the peace and social stability of Japan. At the apex of this system was the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo), at times the largest city in the world, and one of the strangest urban structures in history.
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The Tokugawa social system
In early modern Europe, most people were tenant farmers, who paid rent to landowners. The state sometimes taxed landowners, sometimes tenants, and sometimes both through consumption taxes. In peacetime, however, the early modern state did not do very much, so taxes generally ran at just a few percent of national income.
The picture in Japan was profoundly different. The peasantry was directly taxed by the government, at rates varying from 15 to 70 percent of the harvest, with 40 percent as a rough norm. The authorities distributed most of their tax receipts to the samurai, a hereditary, quasi-noble class making up about six percent of the population. In both cases, the agricultural surplus ended up in the hands of a leisure class, but the Japanese system was structured very differently, with the surplus reaching the leisure class only through the funnel of public taxation.
Only a minority of Japan was directly ruled by the Shogunate. Most of the country was administered by various classes of daimyo: shinpan (collateral branches of the Tokugawa family), fudai (longstanding Tokugawa vassals) and tozama (formerly independent daimyo families who had submitted after the Tokugawa victory in the civil wars). Image Adapted from a map by Fabian Drixler, based on a 2015 exhibit at Yale's Peabody Museum.
Measured by agricultural output, about 15 percent of Japan fell under the direct control of the Shogunate. These were areas that had always belonged to the Tokugawa, or that had been conquered by them during the civil wars. About a tenth of samurai were Tokugawa retainers, who received their stipends directly from the Shogunate.
In about three quarters of Japan, the tax authorities were a different group, the daimyo. The daimyo had originally been the territorial nobility, and in the pre-Tokugawa era, the breakdown of central authority had left them as the effective rulers of their domains. After 1600 the surviving daimyo submitted to the Tokugawa and were rewarded with a role somewhat akin to that of regional governors. There were about 260 daimyo, and about nine tenths of samurai were their retainers.
Urban design as a panopticon for the nobility
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