This study contains twenty-two essays by leading historians on the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), eight of which have never before been published. The Tokugawa Period has long been seen as one of Eastern feudalism, awaiting the breakthrough that came with the Meiji enlightenment and the opening of Japan to the West. The general thrust of these papers is to show that in many institutional aspects Japan was far from backward before the Meiji Period, and that many of the preconditions of modernization were present and developing much earlier than has generally been believed. This collection...