Abstract: The role of the landlord class in Japan’s prewar economic and political development has been widely debated. Moving beyond conflicting arguments of landlords as semifeudal exploiters or as the linchpins of rural market development, more recent research has emphasized the nonmarket institutions, often inherited from the Tokugawa era, in which the contractual relations between landlords and tenants were embedded. However, this research has overemphasized the continuity of the rural economy. Rather than a smooth development, the historical trajectory of rural economic growth followed the “double movement” of capitalist development identified by the historian and economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi.

中文翻译：

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战前日本地主阶级的双重运动

摘要：地主阶级在日本战前经济和政治发展中的作用引起了广泛的争论。超越地主作为半封建剥削者或农村市场发展的关键的相互矛盾的论点，最近的研究强调了通常从德川时代继承的非市场制度，其中嵌入了地主和佃户之间的契约关系。然而，这项研究过分强调农村经济的连续性。农村经济增长的历史轨迹并非平稳发展，而是遵循了历史学家和经济人类学家卡尔·波兰尼所确定的资本主义发展的“双重运动”。