The Tokugawa economy was composed of two separate currency zones, that is, Osaka and the silver-using western provinces (where monme was the standard unit of currency) and Edo and the gold-using eastern half (where ryo was the standard unit).2
It is convenient, therefore, to discuss the wage data using an east—west regional framework. Generally, agricultural productivity in the western provinces, particularly in the areas around Osaka and along the Inland Sea coasts, was high and commercialization advanced.
This, together with the financial power generated by Osaka's wholesale merchants who dominated the Edo-Osaka trade and other transactions between the two currency zones, pushed Kinai's position well above the eastern regions, including the Kanto, an area surrounding the capital city of Edo. It is no coincidence, therefore, that we have more data for the Kinai region, especially in earlier periods. In the course of the latter half of the Tokugawa regime, however, the central government made explicit their preference that gold should become the standard of money in the national economy. This new policy was first implemented in the 1770s when silver coins began to be denominated in a gold unit. The following period witnessed an irreversible decline of the Osaka merchants'control over both credit and commodity markets and, hence, a decline in the economy in the silver zone (Shimbo and Saito 2004). The monetary crisis occasioned by the opening of the country and the influx of Mexican dollars that followed was a further blow to the silver-using Kinai economy. The value of silver dropped dramatically against that of gold during the 1860s, and the Meiji government that replaced the old shogunate set the new yen on parity with the ryo, the basic unit of gold under the Tokugawa shogunate (Ohkura and Shimbo 1978). In order to link the late Tokugawa to the Meiji series accurately, therefore, price and wage data in Edo/Tokyo and other locations in the east should be chosen. For earlier periods, on the other hand, we have no choice but to use the Kinai series.
2.1