Gender and family firm: Strategy and practice in early modern Japan

This dissertation asks how features of the family system contributed to the business success of merchants in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. It relies on archives of Omi merchant houses, supplemented by interviews and field observations. The dissertation sustains three sets of arguments:; First, the continuity and prosperity of family firms was facilitated by particulars of the Japanese stem family system not found in other early modern societies. Unlike conjugal or joint family systems, stem family systems foster unambiguous authority and intergenerational continuity of family firms. Unlike stem family systems elsewhere, the Japanese version sanctioned the establishment of cadet households, a mechanism for family firms to expand their business. Despite normative male primogeniture, in practice heirs were designated by the current head with virtually no constraints. This flexibility provided scope for universalistic selection of heirs and heads of cadet households.; Second, merchants drew on the norms of the samurai elite and on the customary law of peasant communities to develop a unique system attuned to their needs as family firms. Uxorilocal marriage, an option among peasants, became a popular strategy to select a son-in-law for a daughter from among the most promising employees and business associates, thereby bringing a young man of proven ability into the family firm. Dozoku, an hierarchical kin institution that flourished in the rural Northeast, was adapted by merchants as a basis for structuring business alliances.; Third, the conjugal power of wives was relatively high, a feature that follows from other aspects of the merchant family system. The relative clout of merchant wives derived in part from family strategies that relied on the marriage of daughters to recruit able sons-in-law, to link up with other family firms and strengthen existing links within the dozoku, and to enhance the reputation of the firm. Wives tended to dominate uxorilocal marriages, in which the adopted son-in-law was married to the boss's daughter. Since sons-in-law were typically senior clerks who had proved their mettle though long service, their wives were often widowed early and not infrequently took over as de facto head of the family firm.