Traditional China was an agrarian society which experienced a significant development of handicraft and commerce. In this respect, China was similar to medieval Europe and to certain pre-Hellenistic civilizations of the northern and western Mediterranean. However, while these Western agrarian civilizations ultimately lost their societal identity, Chinese society perpetuated its basic features for millennia. And while medieval Europe saw a commercial and industrial revolution that led to the rise of an industrial society, traditional China never underwent such changes.

Obviously, when characterizing societal structures, it is not enough to speak of agriculture, handicraft, and trade in general. We must consider their ecological and institutional setting and the specific human relations involved in their operation.

Historians have pondered over the phenomenon of the propitious appearance in Japan of numerous statesmen in the critical mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps more startling is the number of able leaders who came from Kagoshima, a modest-sized city of the Satsuma fief. Men who played a major role in the history of modern Japan such as Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Matsukata Masayoshi, and Admiral Tōgo Heihachiro grew up together in Kagoshima almost within a stone's throw of each other.

The internal political dissensions of the Yi period (1392–1910) provide a fruitful object of study for students of Korean history. Throughout all but its first decades they troubled the dynasty, eroding the effectiveness of government, introverting the intellectual concerns of the educated, narrowing access to needed new influences, producing social and political rifts which have become deeply ingrained. For all their faults, factional dissensions also brought marked political and intellectual stimulation, and are as important as any of Korea's native institutional phenomena for the formation of her modern political life. Ending only with Yi power in 1910, these struggles still echo under the surface of Korean society.

Studies of peasant rebellions in China are significant because of the key role such disturbances have played in Chinese history. Merely from the point of view of numbers one is impressed by the many references to agrarian violence in the historical records of the various dynasties. To be sure, usually these outbreaks were short-lived, but at times they reached such serious proportions as to become one of the major causes for the fall of a dynasty. Furthermore, as is well known, two major dynasties, the Han and the Ming, were founded by peasant rebels.