Seller:
Powell's Bookstores, Chicago
Location: Chicago, IL

Condition:
Like New

2007. Hardcover. 3 volumes. Cloth. 8vo. Vol. I: 555 pp. Vol. II: 566 pp. Vol. III: 436 pp. Reprint of the New York edition of 1930. Fine.

2007. Hardcover. 3 volumes. Cloth. 8vo. Vol. I: 555 pp. Vol. II: 566 pp. Vol. III: 436 pp. Reprint of the New York edition of 1930. Fine.

Seller:
Sequitur Books
Location: Boonsboro, MD

Condition:
New

Brand new. We distribute directly for the publisher. Clean, unmarked pages. Hardcover. Octavo. Cloth.

Brand new. We distribute directly for the publisher. Clean, unmarked pages. Hardcover. Octavo. Cloth. Three volumes. 1632 pages. Illustrated. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1930. Mr. Takekoshi ranks, indeed, as the chief pioneer of the economic interpretation of history in Japan. This book in English, which is largely a paraphrase of a work written by the same author in Japanese, might well have been called simply "An Economic History of Japan" instead of the rather cumbrous title it actually bears. It traces in detail and with abundant documentation, much of which is entirely new material for non-Japanese scholarship; the growth of economic institutions and ideas up to the time of the recent "westernisation. " The first volume carries the survey from the earliest historic period to the death of Tokugawa Iyeyasu in 1616; the second and third continue the record to the Fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Imperial restoration in 1868. Perhaps the most valuable part of the book, and certainly the most original and generally interesting, is the account given of the rise of the mercantile class in the Ashikaga epoch, of the za alliance, which Takekoshi calls an "internal Hanseatic league, " and of the Japanese free cities, of which Sakai was the most important. This side of Japanese history has hitherto been very much neglected; such a notable authority as Murdoch, in his History of Japan, takes hardly any notice of it. The historical problems of currency in Japan are ably handled and are brought into relation with those of foreign trade. Mr. Takekoshi is at his best on questions of currency and commerce, but there is much of interest and value also in his account of agriculture and land-tenure.