Nobuyuki Yoshida

The premier historian of early modern cities in Japan, Yoshida has brought to the forefront of the field the fine and deepening divisions among urban commoners as well as their consequences for social coherence and economic development. In eight major monographs and countless essays, Yoshida explores the relations between mega-rich financiers (whom he is the first to identify collectively in a remarkable census), the disparate population of shopkeepers and craftspeople, and the equally disparate population of day laborers (who never comprised any monolithic category). His work centers on Edo/Tokyo but ranges across Japan's immense urban landscape to unite granular analyses-of real estate, rents, migration, and labor bosses, for example-with revelatory conclusions about structural inequality and the resources of resistance (not least the desertion of workers in a tight labor market). A comparativist whose work was featured in a 2011 edition of Annales, Yoshida has helped reorient studies of Japan's "modernization" from an agrarian to an urban focus and toward empirically salient understandings of the differences between early modern and modern capitalism.