The Legal System and the Interregional Finance by Wealthy Farmers in the Kinai Region during the Early Modern Period

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.