McClain James L. Merriman John M. - Edo and Paris. Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era

McClain James L. Merriman John M. - Edo and Paris. Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era - James L. Merriman John M. McClain

Edo and Paris marks a watershed in Western-language historical scholarship on Japan, in that it is a comparative study that does not take early modern Japan as an anomaly to be dismissed as a quaint but ultimately irrelevant oddity. The editors have successfully assembled a collection of nineteen interpretive essays and studies that actually compare (implying that common issues and structures exist to be compared) the two urban spaces of Paris and Edo. Before Edo was renamed Tôkyô, or "Eastern Capital," in 1868, it had developed as the center of a complex military bureaucracy that had grown in authority since the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, had chosen that location for his capital in 1603. Edo shared much with Paris, growing rapidly from modest beginnings to become eventually a microcosm of the entire region around it. Edo and Paris both absorbed outside influences and then quickly radiated them to the outside, to the point that both cities eventually became synonymous with the culture of the state as a whole. The contributors to Edo and Paris carefully examine the dynamics -- material and intellectual -- behind such developments in both cities.