Miyazaki Yasusada
Miyazaki Yasusada was an early Edo period scholar of agronomy. He is known as one of the earliest and/or most prominent thinkers to articulate a concept of the intensification of labor as a means of expanding agricultural production. This notion was central to 20th c. historian Hayami Akira's characterization of Edo period Japan's economic growth as due to an "industrious revolution," driven by intense inputs of labor, in contrast to Europe's Industrial Revolution, which was driven by technological innovation aimed at reducing the extent of the necessity of human labor.
Yasusada also advocated for the focused, strategic, production of certain cash crops for export, as a means of combatting worrisome outflows of precious metals from the country. His Nôgyô zensho (Complete Writings on Agriculture) owed much to the work of Ming Dynasty scholar Xu Guangqi.
References
- Ronald Toby, Hayami Akira 速水融, et al, “Edo no kurashi ha kokusai kankei no naka ni” 「江戸の暮らしは国際関係の中に」, Kokusai kōryū 国際交流 59 (1992), 18.
