Business Organization in Early Modern Japan
研究了日本近代早期（1600-1868）商人如何利用家庭（ie）构建虚构实体，在没有正式法律的情况下创建跨地区、多店铺的大型企业，并保护资产免受债权人和统治者索取。
This article examines how merchants in early modern Japan (1600–1868) created large-scale enterprises that contained multiple stores across several jurisdictions and employed hundreds of staff in the absence of formal legal institutions designed to facilitate the formation of complex businesses. It argues that early modern merchants made use of the household ( ie ) to construct fictive entities that looked, wrote, and acted like individual merchants on paper, but could be controlled by different people, divided into shares, and used to shield assets from claims by local creditors and rulers. Through the clever deployment of these fictive entities, merchants constructed expansive business empires. The article uses the archive of the Nakai Genzaemon, one of the period’s wealthiest merchants, to show how these entities worked, then compares the Nakai’s organization with other premodern businesses inside and outside of Japan. Based on this analysis, the conclusion offers a critique of institutional approaches to the study of economic and business history as well as suggestions toward a new understanding of the relationship between business, state, and society in early modern Japan.