ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two major developments in early modern Japan that mark both a break with the medieval Japanese experience and a connection with the early modern experience elsewhere in the world: the emergence of a strong state and the penetration of a market economy. These developments occasioned additional changes that, collectively, historians tend to take as defining features of early modernity: urbanization; the specialization and integration of labor; the redistribution of income to a nascent middle class. Other additional changes that: the growth of popular consumption; the spread of schooling, literacy, and commercial printing; and the improvement in standards of well-being, from nutrition to life expectancy. In mature form, Japan's early modern market was made up of highly differentiated but integrated sectors organized for profit from specialized work. The trend across the early modern period was toward greater commoner wealth, both agrarian and nonagrarian, although distribution was so jagged that poverty remained aggressive throughout sectors.
