Towards a prehistory of the Great Divergence:

Abstract

This essay argues that the primary socio-economic formations of premodern Japan were formed in the Bronze Age via processes of ancient globalisation across Eurasia. Multi-crop cereal agriculture combining rice, millet, wheat and barley with a minor contribution from domesticated animals spread from Bronze Age Korea to Japan at the beginning of the first millennium BC. This agricultural system gradually expanded through the archipelago while engendering new economic niches centred on trade, raiding and specialised fishing. From the fifth century AD the horse became widely used for warfare, transport and overseas trade. While alluvial rice farming provided staple finance for the early state, it is argued here that the concept of the ‘maritime mode of production’ better explains economic processes in the nonstate spaces of Japan until the early seventeenth century. Despite this diversity in socio-economic formations, the post-Bronze Age globalisation of food in Japan appears to have been delayed compared to many other regions of Eurasia and to have been less impacted by elite consumption. Further research is required to confirm this suggestion and the essay outlines several areas where archaeological research could contribute to debates over the ‘Great Divergence’ and the economic development of the modern world.

The evolving Japanese: the dual structure hypothesis at 30

“…The idea – inherent in Hanihara ( 1991 ) but made explicit by popular writers such as Umehara ( 1990 ) – that the Yayoi spread quickly to admix with the Jōmon and form a Japanese culture essentially identical to that known from the premodern historical record needs to be completely re-assessed. Contrary to earlier accounts, the shift from Jōmon to Yayoi was slow and involved complex historical processes whereby Jōmon populations developed new economic niches which enabled them to retain some degree of autonomy from Yayoi farmers (Hoover and Hudson 2016 ; Segawa 2017 ; Hudson 2019 , in press ). For instance, the Hizen Fudoki , an eighth-century gazetteer, noted that in the Gotō islands of Nagasaki, ‘The facial features of seafarers living on these islands resemble those of the hayahito [Hayato].…”

“…The Hizen Fudoki notes that, in addition to exploiting fish and other marine products, the Gotō islanders also raised cattle and horses. As recently argued by Segawa ( 2017 ) and Hudson ( 2019 ), the transition from Jōmon to Yayoi involved a radical re-structuring of economic practices in the Japanese Islands. While immigrant farming populations did expand across the archipelago as predicted by Hanihara, native Jōmon groups also developed new niches based on trade, specialised fishing and maritime hunting, and even pastoralism.…”

“… in press ). However, while the broad outlines of the farming/language dispersal hypothesis applied to the Japanese Islands remain well understood, the case of Japan is complex, in part because the transition to full-scale farming occurs much later – already well into the Bronze Age – than the rest of Northeast Asia (Hudson 2019 , in press ).…”

“…The diversity of Yayoi culture has been increasingly emphasised by archaeologists over the past decade or so, yet there remains a reluctance to re-define the Yayoi beyond a Childean framework (Hudson 2019 ). For instance, Fujio ( 2013 ) explains the Yayoi as a culture which adopted irrigated wet rice cultivation as its basis of production and which engaged in ‘Yayoi rituals’ to maintain that production.…”

Archaeolinguistic evidence for the farming/language dispersal of Koreanic

“…However, this specialist use of marine resources does not necessarily contradict the importance of millet farming. In Japan, for example, the transition to agriculture in the first millennium BC was marked by the increased importance of specialized fishing, which was perhaps oriented towards trade with farmers (Hudson, 2019a ; Takase, 2020 ; cf. Ling et al, 2018 ).…”