This paper examines the factors that enabled wealthy farmers to develop financial businesses across different territories and provinces during the early modern period. Focusing on the Toyama Heishichiro family, a wealthy farm family in Izumi, this study analyzes how their operations expanded while navigating the unique legal systems of Osaka and Sakai. The Toyama family expanded their financial business, especially from the 1820s, providing relatively large, unsecured, low-interest loans to people as far away as 60 kilometers. The following research question will be addressed: how did the Toyama family manage to collect debts from domination areas and remote places where the legal system of shogunate magistrates was applied? In such cases, the plaintiffs and defendants were different lords, and special agreements (informal deeds or end sentences) that did not appear in the official deeds.
Specifically, this study clarified the following three points regarding the Toyama family’s practices, (1) When making loan contracts with remote peasants and townspeople, official deeds were exchanged in the form of joint and several debts in principle. (2) By having a resident of the village where the Toyama family lived added as one of the joint debtors, it was possible for the creditor to be tried at the shogunate’s magistrates, which was more favorable to the creditor, in the event of a suit for benefits. (3) At the time of the benefit suit, to seize all the debtor’s assets as much as possible, the village official swore by informal deed or by a letter in the back that the debtor had no debt of pledge, no debt for non-payment of tribute, and no debt for worship of public money. This reveals that the judicial protection of claims against the official deed of joint and several obligations and the deterrence of private enforceability against the covenants of the informal deed (or end sentence) supported wide-area finance.
