to Europe, not to its feudal background, but specifically to the Protestant ethic. A second look at the Weberian thesis would seem called for.
Feudal rule in Japan was often as arbitrary as that of the centralized government of China, but the barrier between the military ruling class and the commoners worked both ways. If the commoner could not cross it to join the ruling class, he also knew that members of the ruling class would not cross it to enter his own profession. He was relatively secure in his own field of activity. Moreover a society of strict class cleavages produced a much stronger sense of inalienable rights accruing to each specific class than ever developed in the more mobile society of China.
One sees this best in the way capital was invested in Japan in late feudal times. There was less incentive to put capital into land than there was in China, both because landownership, as such, could not bring with it full social respectability and also because other types of investment were relatively safe. The commercial classes naturally put their profits into expanding their businesses, and well-to-do peasants rarely acquired more than five or six of the diminutive plots of land that serve as farmsteads in Japan. Instead they commonly invested their further profits in small local industrial operations, such as little factories for making bean paste, soy sauce, dyes, or textiles. They readily became entrepreneurs of a type that was almost unknown in the rest of Asia.
In this and in many other ways, late feudal Japan was developing a type of economy that might be called proto-capitalistic, despite the feudal political structure. It is therefore not surprising that the Japanese in the second half of the nineteenth century were able to adopt the capitalistic institutions of Europe with ease, while the other Asian peoples found this a much more difficult matter.
These conclusions are of importance in explaining the recent history of Japan, but they are even more significant when we apply them to some of our broad theories about history in general. The whole Japanese experience suggests that the medieval-modern or feudal-capitalist sequence is after all a natural one. That is to say, for those areas that have had feudalism, capitalism would appear to be a normal next step, as Western theories have assumed. But the very fact that capitalism seems to have grown quite naturally out of feudalism in both Europe and Japan should warn us against assuming that capitalism is an inevitable or natural stage in societies which have not known feudalism. Western theories of unilinear historical development may be no more sound regarding the capitalist stage than they are with regard to feudalism. And if neither
