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1 results

  • 6 - The Meiji Restoration

  • from Part I - The Character of the Early Modern State
  • Edited by David L. Howell, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    15 January 2024
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023, pp 184-226

  • Summary

    Considered in a global context, the Meiji Restoration was a nationalist, bourgeoise revolution. At the heart of many Meiji reforms was the creation of a new national identity. The Meiji government abolished hereditary status distinctions, replaced regional institutions with a powerful central administration, and promoted the cultural and political unity of the Japanese people. The government also advanced the core institutions and mechanisms of capitalism: the alienation and partibility of land, tax collection in cash rather than kind, stock markets, bond markets, and public banking. The Meiji Restoration also needs to be considered in the context of imperialism. The Meiji leadership confronted an international order bifurcated between an elite tier of nation-states with colonial holdings and a subordinate class of subjugated colonial possessions. That context made imperialism a logical component of the Meiji state-building project. As a nascent world power, Japan required its own colonial empire.