(^364) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
ables, including the products of rural industry.^16 Support from above
combined with private initiative to increase both area of cultivation and
crops. Area cultivated doubled from 1598 to 1716-36; while crops in
creased some 65 percent from 1598 to 1834.^17 Another estimate has
land and labor productivity in agriculture rising 30-50 percent from
1600 to 1867.^18 Such calculations focus on rice, but an important fur
ther source of gain lay in the development of side crops and specialties:
sericulture, other cereal grains, new species such as sugar and sweet
potatoes. Urbanization increased demand for specialties. Villages near
cities turned to truck farming and gardening, just as happened around
London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^19 Some ban also
dug out minerals not claimed by the Bakufu—copper and later coal.*
The Achilles heel of this development was the temptation for au
thorities to create monopolies and distort prices in their favor. Nor
mally, competition from other ban restored market order. Unlike
Europe, where the market was fragmented by politics, custom, and
high costs of transport, Japan's compactness and commercial unity
tended to vitiate protection. Sometimes, however, as with Satsuma
sugar, climatic advantages protected the ban from most outside com
petition.^20 Some fifty-three "domain monopolies" were still in effect at
the end of the Edo (Tokugawa) period. These monopolies no doubt
offered advantages to the participants: the ban, the merchants, the
producers (farmers or manufacturers). The consumer paid.
An important innovation was the rise of a cottage cotton manufac
ture. As in Europe, cotton came late, not really spreading in Japan
until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but then
quickly replacing hemp and winning a wide market for its cheapness,
convenience, and comfort. Its manufacture in Japan took several forms:
urban production by craft guilds; rural shops run by independent mas
ters (peasants turned industrial entrepreneurs) and employing inside
and outside spinners and weavers; rural putting-out, where merchants
supplied the raw materials and even the tools and bought back the fin
ished and semifinished product. In the long run, as in England, urban
manufacture gave way to rural. Wages were lower in the countryside,
and guild regulations in the towns were stifling. Numbers of agricul
tural villages turned into collective cotton fabriques. Farming was done
in spare time or simply abandoned, sometimes to the distress of local
rulers and notables.^21
- The Tokugawa had confiscated gold and silver mines previously controlled by the
domains.