Beginning in 1260, the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan embarked on the creation of a Chinese-style bureaucracy to govern his realm more effectively. At the same time, the court began to promulgate a salary code for its officials. Though both processes were led in large part by Chinese scholar-officials, this group continually complained about the shortcomings of the salary code and its negative effects on the bureaucracy. By studying their writings on salaries and official government records, this article will demonstrate that the Chinese literati used their complaints about the salary code to level criticisms against flaws in the administration and to push for bureaucratic reform, and that the Yuan court was genuinely concerned about the salary problem and took measures to alleviate it. Yet the court never actually reformed, and this article will ultimately aim to show how the response to the issue of salaries reflected the Mongols’ desires to cling to the power and privilege that was afforded to them by a bureaucratic structure which preserved much of their traditional steppe institutions and values.

Depending on conditions, Chinese peasants strategically adopted one of two types of transactions: either a single one-time transaction without reference to any particular buyer, or repeated transactions dependent on one regular broker. Based on the different sizes of market zones and responding to seasonality, Chinese peasant households allotted their labour to maximize income and avert risk. Generally, in early modern China, the volume of exchanges among peasants was much greater than the volume of exchanges between peasants and merchants from towns. One-time transactions were dominant not only by the choice of peasants for concluding local transactions but also by the petit traders who connected villages and towns. Thus, price movements in local currencies such as copper coins in local marketplaces did not follow the movements of inter-regional trade made in silver. Maintaining the independence of local trade, local merchants established a system for settlements through account books and issued native notes to respond to chronic shortages of currency. In Japan, peasant households showed similar characteristics of seasonal allocation and division of intra-household labour, but in the nineteenth century were less dependent on local marketplaces and maintained more continuous relationships among villagers as well as with merchants from towns. The differences between China and Japan during the early modern era, when economies depended heavily on small-size peasant households with less specialization, reveals the inadequacy of conventional conceptions of markets such as Smithian growth, which ignore the differences between local trade and inter-regional trade, and underestimate the importance of proximate exchanges among peasants, which reflected their desire for a higher degree of freedom when making transactions.

This study aims to discuss the significant role of “peasant society” in understanding the economic history of both modern and early modern Japan.

Independent peasant households proliferated in Japan in the seventeenth century, and from around the turn of the eighteenth century onwards they underwent a transformation into entities called ie, which owned family properties and bore responsibility for conveying these properties to the next generation. Although the development of the market economy also contributed to maintaining and activating the peasant society, the function of the labour market was strongly influenced by the strategy of peasant households to pursue the optimal utilization of slack labour generated by the seasonally fluctuating labour demand from agriculture. Under these constraints, peasant households tended to deliver non-agricultural employment opportunities to their members, forming a kind of barrier against mobilizing family workers outside the household. These barriers were supported by region-based industrial development such as a weaving industry adopting the putting-out system most suitable to the requirements of peasant households. Rural-based capital accumulation together with the workings of the regional financial markets contributed to maintaining particular peasant household behaviours by supporting region-based industrial development, which featured in Japan's path of economic and social development from the early modern to the modern period.