468 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
Thus the daimyo were disinherited and the samurai class destroyed.
Though there was resistance, most violently in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877,
the most remarkable feature of the era was how radically society could be
altered and with relatively little loss of life. It was in part because the com-
moner class of Japan, or chonin (city dwellers), had already achieved a degree
of autonomy in the many castle towns that had sprung up in Tokugawa times.
The disruptions of the early Meiji era thus affected them far less than they did
the privileged classes they had worked free of. The urban economy had already
moved forward into a market economy that would soon expand exponentially
to their advantage. The new language of “freedom” and “people’s rights” rang
true to them. When the Meiji Constitution was adopted in 1889—modeled not
on the American or the French but on the German constitution of Bismarck—
it was the first in Asia. In this, as in other ways, Japan led the way into the
twentieth century.REFERENCES CITED
Fay, Peter Ward. 1975. The Opium War, 1840–1842. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Gibney, Alex. 1992. The Meiji Revolution. The Pacific Century. Documentary. Pacific
Basin Institute and KCTS-TV.
Hepper, F. Nigel. 1982. Kew Gardens for Science and Pleasure. London: Her Majesty’s Sta-
tionery Office.
Pombejra, Dhiravat. 1993. Ayutthaya at the End of the Seventeenth Century: Was
There a Shift to Isolation? In Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era; Trade, Power,
and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid. Pp. 250–272. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Spence, Jonathan D. 1974. Emperor of China; Self Portrait of K’Ang-Hsi. London: Pimlico.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Ori-
gins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.