This is a comparative study of the important problems posed by the imperial finances in Korea and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when both states were trying to form a modern financial system, in other words, a 'tax state'. Both had to overcome the 'doctrine of imperial land' (the notion that all lands in the country belong to the sovereign). Korea applied the doctrine of imperial ownership of all land up to the time of the last land survey, never developing doctrines and institutions to justify levying taxes on citizens once their rights to land ownership had been recognised. Japan, however, severed the relation between the king's sovereign power over land and the right to ownership of that land. The doctrine of imperial land' was replaced by the principle that taxes were the expenses paid by the members of the national community for the upkeep of the community. In this regard, it can be said that the concept of taxation in the Japanese Imperial Constitution had advanced one step further than the sovereign's tax of Korea. Even so, the Japanese system failed to establish the reciprocal right of citizens to agree to the levying of taxes.

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In the late nineteenth century, Japanese agricultural laborers had normally borrowed so much from their employers that they were entirely dependent on them. Despite this, the employers were unable to use the services of such laborers whenever they wanted. Evidence of why this was so can be found through examining the case of the Tsukamoto family, a rich farming family of Hatta village in Sennan, Osaka. Many Hatta inhabitants were debtors of the Tsukamoto, and such people were hired by them as daily agricultural laborers. But villagers indebted to the family, including agricultural laborers, would often band together to demand debt reduction. This makes it clear that if the family had tried to hire day laborers whenever it suited them by using threats about debt payment, they would have been considered hostile by the inhabitants. However, since the head of the family was also the headman of the village, the Tsukamoto also had the responsibility of preserving order. They were therefore unable to use the services of day labourers whenever it suited them for fear that village inhabitants would disrupt the peace.

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This article uses documents from the Niida Collection on contracts for water supplies in Beijing to focus on groups of water carriers from Shandong. For centuries these people migrated to Beijing and engaged in the sale of water for domestic use. Information on them is scarce, but their numbers are calculated to have amounted to around ten thousand men in the late Qing and early Republican eras. The paper also considers the urbanization process from the Ming and Qing dynasties onwards, and the migration of village farmers into the city. Beijing suffered from a serious water shortage. From the late Ming and early Qing, migrants from Shandong supplied water to residents and eventually competition led to the formation of different territories, the development of exclusive monopolies, and the formation of 'waterways', an order and rights concerning the handling of users' capital to pay for water supplies. The negative social image of water carriers was a result of the gap between their self-imposed order and the more liberated economic and social order of the city. While they made an important contribution to the everyday life of the city, they remained of marginal status and were never accepted as full inhabitants.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine economic change in farming districts in modern north China, focusing on the shift in the relative importance of farming and off-farm occupations in different peasant households. After the construction of the Beijing-Hankou railroad in Ding county in 1900, in one particular area that was both situated along the railroad and suitable for cotton cultivation, peasant households began to use their male labor force to produce cotton handicrafts for sale. In other areas, however, geographic and geological conditions resulted in the persistence of biannual triple cropping. Later, the demand for cotton textiles led more and more peasant households in the former area to concentrate on cotton handicrafts, to the extent of cutting down their cultivated acreage. Accordingly, it became increasingly difficult for them to give up cotton handicrafts even during recessions. That was the reason why American strains of cotton, which could not be used for handicraft production, were cultivated not in the former area, but in the latter ones, after irrigation. In other words, each peasant household decided its course based on its own existing reproduction structure. This is why the process of commercialization in rural modern north China exhibited regional differences.

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