This volume in The Cambridge History of Japan provides the most comprehensive account available in any Western language of Japan's transformation from a feudal society to a modern nation state. Volume 5 traces the roots and the course of political, social, and institutional change that took place in Japan from late Tokugawa times to the early twentieth century. The interrelated collection of authoritative and analytical essays by specialists in the history of nineteenth century Japan discuss the fissures in late feudal society, the impact of and response to the Western world, the overthrow of...

This third volume in The Cambridge History of Japan is devoted to the three and a half centuries spanning the final decades of the twelfth century when the Kamakura bakufu was founded, to the mid-sixteenth century when civil wars raged following the effective demise of the Muromachi bakufu. Volume 3 contains thirteen specially commissioned essays written by leading Japanese and American scholars that survey the historical events and developments in medieval Japan's polity, economy, society, and culture, as well as its relations with its Asian neighbors. The essays reflect the most recent...