Event

Domestic consumption is vital to all market economies but became particularly important in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), given the heavy constraints on foreign trade and real estate transactions an capital formation. Nonetheless, both sumptuary laws and household ethics dicouraged anything more than strictly utilitarian spending as damaging both to the social order and the family's security. So, how do we account for the prodigious consumption, across the social spectrum that sustained the Tokugawa economy?

Mary Elizabeth Berry is Class of 1944 Professor of History at University of California-Berkeley.

This event is part of the the Penn Year of Discovery, 2015-2016 Center for the Integrated Study of Japan Colloquium series Discovering the Early Modern through Tokugawa Japan. Reception following talk.

Co-sponsored by the Penn Global Engagement Fund and the Center for East Asian Studies Humanities Colloquium