This volume presents seven essays that I believe collectively serve as a reliable and readable Japanese economic history from the last several decades of the Tokugawa period (1800–68) to the early 1970s. The first four chapters are selected from Volumes 5 and 6 of the The Cambridge History of Japan, published respectively in 1989 and 1988, and the remaining three chapters were published in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Part II in 1978. As I describe below, these three chapters are included in this volume, despite the date of their publication, because I believe they remain valuable in describing and analyzing those aspects of the Japanese economy that they cover.

In Chapter 1, “Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century,” E. Sydney Crawcour presents an authoritative study of the eventful last decades of the Tokugawa period and the tumultuous two decades following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. His analysis, reflecting a thorough command of English and Japanese sources, contains illuminating descriptions and discussions of numerous significant developments that were transforming the economy in many fundamental ways.

The most important topics examined by Crawcour include the reasons for, and characteristics of, several serious economic problems faced by the Tokugawa bakufu, the reforms attempted by the bakufu to solve them, various effects of opening the economy to foreign trade, and the “continuity and change” seen and development achieved during the 1868–85 period.