Social Structure and Population Change: A Comparative Study of Tokugawa Japan and Ch'ing China

Abstract

Whenever excessive population has become a problem man throughout history has felt the need to control his numbers (and we cannot doubt that such limitation took place even before recorded history). Today as always it seems that control remains a controversial issue with pro-natalists condemning some or even all control practices and injunctions as immoral or contrary to the national interest. Given an issue as important as this any light that the past can shed on population change should be useful. This paper is a historical inquiry into two disparate patterns of population change and how the differences affected the divergent socioeconomic development of each. The determinants of population change are geographic characteristics the economic environment the state of birth-control technology and the social structure. Rapid changes in the state of technology are recent phenomena; thus for most of human history the technology has been quite primitive. Consequently it is the other three factors that have been of overriding importance. It can be said that the proximate cause of population change is social structure because geographic and economic constraints induce changes in that structure and necessarily have to act through it. We present here the vividly contrasting records on preindustrial change of population in Tokugawa Japan and Ching China. We will argue that social institutions played a crucial role in disposing the Japanese toward population control and the Chinese toward population increase. We believe moreover that certain features of the Tokugawa population change discussed here will throw new light on the economic developments of the Tokugawa period and help to explain the unprecedented rapidity of the post-Tokugawa economic transformation. Our study is limited to the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) in Japan and to the Ching period (1644-1912) in China. (excerpt)