Hunter-gatherer experiences of colonialism do not explain subsequent patterns of socio-economic development

1 Introduction

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, large swathes of the world came under European, American and Japanese colonial control. Japanese imperialism began with the 1869 conquest of Hokkaido and expanded rapidly across East Asia and the western Pacific. At its height in 1942–43, the Japanese empire was the fourth largest in the world after Britain, the Soviet Union and France (Duffy 2026: 12) (Figure 1). How different patterns of colonial rule affected subsequent social and economic growth in the countries affected has been the subject of extensive research. Most such research has naturally focused on the role of the colonising powers. Ramseyer (2026) attempts to turn that scholarship on its head through an emphasis on the people who were colonised.¹ He proposes that countries where colonisation did not lead to economic growth were places that had only recently transitioned from hunter-gathering to farming. Since, according to Ramseyer, hunter-gatherers lack concepts of land ownership and were ‘relentlessly violent’, they could not take advantage of the ‘rational’ legal institutions introduced by colonial powers. He suggests farmers had three advantages over hunter-gatherers: (1) they could accept the legal institutions of the colonising power and invest in future growth; (2) they appreciated the importance of private ownership of land and could understand ‘delayed gratification’; and (3) they had lower levels of inter-personal violence. Ramseyer attempts to illustrate this argument with the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, following their colonisation by Japan in the Meiji era (1868–1912).

Ramseyer's approach builds on ‘neoclassical institutional economics’ (cf. Field 1981) but with some differences. Acemoglu et al. (2001) argued that Europeans found it difficult to settle countries with high settler mortality rates and consequently introduced extractive institutions that contributed little to the overall socio-economic growth of those places. In contrast to previous research, which had tended to focus on the identity of the colonisers, Acemoglu et al. (2001: 1373) ‘emphasize the conditions in the colonies’. Ramseyer expands this perspective through the proposal that the mode of subsistence of the colonised peoples (foraging versus farming) was the key differential. Ramseyer's measurement here is ‘growth’. The word remains undefined but seems to be employed in the sense of rising income per capita. While many economic historians accept this as a convenient if crude measure to analyse very long-term trends (e.g., Bassino et al. 2019), those historians acknowledge that other aspects of human welfare are also important, if harder to measure (Jones 1988). Ramseyer himself eschews consideration of such factors in favour of a single-minded focus on land and private property. Like Hobbes and Locke, Ramseyer sees the state as an arrangement to prevent anarchy through the judicial regulation of property. He adopts a punctuationalist view of economic history, yet instead of the traditional focus on the Industrial Revolution, it is the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that gains more attention. Ramseyer proposes that farming led naturally to private property and thus to economic growth. If, as Jones (1988: xx) quips, human history slumbered in a Snow-White-like coma before the kiss of the Industrial Revolution awakened growth, Ramseyer implies that growth was already present from the Neolithic. Farming increased population levels in a dramatic fashion (Bocquet-Appel 2011), but it also led to ‘Malthusian’ problems of the relationship between demography and subsistence, and many economic historians paint a much bleaker picture in which pre-industrial growth was erratic and limited.

1.1 Background issues, methods and ‘initial puzzles’

Ramseyer (2026) covers some big questions about the human past—hunter-gatherer sociality, the origins of agriculture, violence and human nature, the relationship between foragers and expanding farmers, premodern patterns of land use and ownership, and the social transformations associated with modernity. However, his essay often presents a restricted narrative and a brief contextualisation is necessary to orient the reader. Ramseyer (2026) follows other publications in which he criticises minority groups in Japan (Ramseyer 2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b; Ramseyer and Rasmusen 2018). Several of these writings connect to historical revisionism, the idea that Japan's responsibility for the actions of its colonial empire and wartime aggression is over-drawn, even ‘masochistic’ (see McCormack 1998; Kimura 2016; Myadar et al. 2022; Tsukamoto 2022). Ramseyer's writings on Japanese minorities have been refuted at length by specialists (e.g., Amos et al. 2021; Morris-Suzuki 2021; 2025; Myadar et al. 2022; Stanley et al. 2021; Yamaguchi 2022). However, his work enjoys a certain popularity in historical revisionist circles in Japan (e.g., Kubota 2021; Miyamoto 2021; Manning 2025; Yoshida 2025) where historical revisionism is increasingly associated with discrimination and hate speech against minority groups (Kim-Wachutka 2019; lewallen 2015). Watkins (2025) discusses anti-Ainu discrimination found in a recent book which claims the Jōmon people (who inhabited the archipelago ca. 14,500-1000 BC) were the true ancestors of the Japanese, while the Ainu are ‘relative latecomers to Japan’: ‘The Ainu, the [book] suggests, are indigenous neither to Hokkaido nor to Japan’ (Manning 2023).² An example of anti-Ainu discrimination occurred while we were writing this article. A display in a Sapporo shopping mall produced by an activist group called Ainu shijitsu o manabu kai (Group for the Study of the True History of the Ainu) included comments such as Ainu wa senjūmin ka??? (‘Are the Ainu really indigenous???’), as well as claims that the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act was enacted in part through ‘strong requests from Ainu representatives and others’ and ‘was a law that provided the Ainu with every possible benefit’ (Ōtaki 2026). Japanese television reports covering the display showed Ainu people angry and sometimes in tears.

These ideas represent a radical break with previous research. Standard anthropological and historical understandings conclude that Ainu are derived from Jōmon ancestors, whereas it is the Japanese who were the relative latecomers to the archipelago.³ Denials of Ainu indigeneity stand in stark contrast to a long intellectual history that has regarded the Ainu as a pivotal ethnic group in Japanese and Eurasian prehistory (e.g., Kreiner 1993; Sternberg 1929; Tamburello 1969). Ramseyer does not deny that the Ainu were native to Hokkaido: this fact is important to his narrative. However, he is probably the first Western scholar to suggest that the Ainu ceased to exist after colonisation in 1869.

In terms of methods, Ramseyer (2026) follows his earlier publications in a distrust of the humanities (see Ramseyer 2014). This has two major problems for his narrative: a rejection of the concept of settler colonialism and a belief that anthropology (and the humanities in general) remain wedded to the myth of the ‘noble savage’. The failure to engage with settler colonialism on a theoretical level is especially problematic (Supplementary Information). Ramseyer (2026: 160) insists that ‘to identify the brutality that characterizes hunter-gatherer societies (and prevents the formation of dense communities among them) threatens the “noble savage” myth by which the humanities departments seem so often implicitly to describe them.’ The idea of the noble savage began from the 16th century as Europeans observed that Native American ‘men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen’ (Graeber and Wengrow 2021: 38). Contra Ramseyer (2026: 160), Rousseau did not create the myth; the concept was in fact popularised in the 19th century by racist writers as a term of ridicule to dismiss native peoples (Ellingson 2001; Graeber and Wengrow 2021: 68–71).

Ramseyer begins with what he calls ‘initial puzzles’ regarding colonialism and economic growth. The first is that research should focus on the colonial powers rather than the people who were colonised. By definition, however, imperial and other colonial regimes are ‘built on violence, subjugation, and domination’ (Duffy 2026: 23) and not through equal participation in historical transformations. The title of Ramseyer's essay suggests a concern with the agency of colonised peoples; the absence of any such analysis reveals this as a hollow declaration. Ramseyer notes that the degree of violence administered to colonial subjects could differ. Indigenous groups in the United States, Canada and Australia ‘faced massive slaughter campaigns’ whereby the colonial powers attempted to eradicate them (Ramseyer 2026: 169). The details, let alone nuances (cf. Dwyer and Ryan 2016), of those campaigns are glossed over in favour of accounts of crime and dysfunctional behaviour amongst present-day Indigenous peoples, but the Ainu are offered as an informative test case because the Japanese government did not expressly conduct a policy of genocide. Nevertheless, colonisation made the Ainu superfluous to Japan's needs (Hirano 2015)—in contrast to the medieval and early modern periods when they had played an important role in providing goods for the Japanese market.

Ramseyer's second ‘puzzle’ is sub-Saharan Africa, which he regards as a backward region in world history due to three factors: the influence of French colonialism, high mortality from endemic disease, and the late spread of agriculture. As discussed in our Supplementary Information, none of these factors hold up to analysis.

In this article, we critique Ramseyer (2026) with respect to four issues. First, while his ‘cost/benefit’ approach gives the impression of scientific rigour, his failure to consider the currency of evolutionary fitness results in a simplification of the historical agency of the Ainu. Second, Ramseyer displays a profound misunderstanding of hunter-gatherers, their history, sociality and subsistence planning, and patterns of violence. Third, his claims are based on a narrative of Ainu history that over-simplifies or distorts numerous issues including plant cultivation, territoriality, demography, violence and ethnic identity. Fourth, through a misplaced emphasis on the ‘failures’ of the Ainu to adapt to Japanese colonialism, Ramseyer underplays the huge social disturbances that industrial modernity caused to millions of Japanese south of Hokkaido.

2 Human behavioural ecology

Ramseyer (2026) follows his recent publications (2020a, 2021a) in employing a ‘cost-benefit’ framework derived from microeconomics. Cost-benefit analyses in anthropology are usually known by the name human behavioural ecology (hereafter HBE), an approach widely used in hunter-gatherer studies (Shennan 2002). Ramseyer cites extensively from one such study (Bettinger et al. 2007), but because he misunderstands the basis of the theory his conclusions are not supported. The underlying problem is explained by Bettinger (2006: 306) himself: ‘For the economist, rationality indexes utility in the abstract; … In HBE, by contrast, utility is specified with reference to evolutionary theory that gives priority to currencies closely related to [evolutionary] fitness, food being one of these, prestige being another.’ In reducing the complex evolutionary factors surrounding the transition from foraging to farming to a single determining factor—land ownership—Ramseyer provides a clear example of this problem.

HBE is concerned with evolutionary fitness. In simple terms, this means how individuals attempt to optimise choices related to dietary intake and reproductive success. How did Ainu attempt such optimisation under colonialism? Ramseyer proposes that becoming a modern Japanese subject was the only choice available. In reality, colonialism severely reduced the options available to Ainu people: many of their traditional subsistence activities were banned by Meiji authorities; they were forced to farm but assigned poor-quality land and little concrete assistance; they were forcibly incorporated into a foreign state which made new requirements regarding language, education and so on; and even if new medical knowledge began to reach Hokkaido, contact with Japan meant that they were afflicted by an increase in epidemic diseases such smallpox and tuberculosis. Above all, Ainu were told they were a ‘dying race’. Western observers—paragons of the modern in the eyes of the Meiji Japanese—saw Ainu as a people doomed to extinction. During earlier periods the Ainu had to some extent been able to exploit new socio-ecological niches in reaction to Japanese encroachment; Meiji colonialism now made that nearly impossible.

Bettinger and others have argued that social conventions regarding ownership of subsistence resources were important to the development of agriculture (Bettinger 2001; Bettinger et al. 2007; Bowles and Choi 2013, 2019). Hunter-gatherers nevertheless display a diverse range of behaviours related to territoriality, sedentism and storage:

In California, food was private property and territories were sharply marked and defended by sedentary groups (Kroeber 1939). In most western Great Basin groups, proprietary claims were less sharply defined with respect to territory … but reemerged at the level of gathered food, which was everywhere private property (Steward 1938: 253), just as in California… Storage was not as extensively practiced in Australia, but what there was of it is demonstrably connected with territoriality. … [Clan rituals] reinforced a highly developed system of territoriality framed around sacred sites that frequently coincided with reliable springs and resource-rich areas (Gould 1969; Layton 1992; Layton et al. 1991; Tindale 1972). … The nonstoring San [of the Kalahari Desert] observed an analogous territorial system, not ritually elaborated, that similarly required outsiders to obtain permission in person from the owners of a territory (e.g., Lee 1984: 58; Silberbauer 1972: 295–298). [Bettinger 2001: 176]

The problem thus becomes how to analyse historical Ainu patterns of territoriality and resource defence, yet Ramseyer makes no attempt at such an analysis.

Another example of Ramseyer's weak understanding of evolutionary theory relates to violence. He writes that ‘in hunter-gatherer societies the most aggressive men mated with the most women, ensured access to the most food, and had the most offspring surviving to reproductive age. Necessarily, those offspring tended to share their father's aggression’ (2026: 167). This claim is critiqued in Section 3.2 but it should also be noted that non-violent paths to increasing fitness are important to many hunter-gatherers. For example, the ‘costly signalling’ hypothesis proposes that some individuals contribute more resources to the common pool in the hope of obtaining mating and alliance-building opportunities (Bliege Bird et al. 2001; Smith and Bliege Bird 2000).

3 Hunter-gatherer theory

Although the transition from hunter-gathering to farming is key to Ramseyer's narrative, his understanding of the former is weak and outdated. Ramseyer's hunter-gatherer is a pathetic figure, confined to a life that is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ in Hobbes’ famous phrase. We are told that foragers live in ‘small, transient bands’ whereas farmers have ‘dense, sedentary communities’ (Ramseyer 2026: 161). The re-evaluation of hunter-gatherer lifeways that began in the 1960s seems to have escaped Ramseyer's attention. Research over the past half-century has re-evaluated hunter-gatherers as the ‘original affluent society’, people who could feed themselves with unexpectedly low inputs of labour and—in many cases—without formal ownership of land, leaving plenty of time for social and artistic activities (Lee and DeVore 1968; Sahlins 1972; Lee 1979; Bettinger 1991, 2001; Kelly 1995; Arnold 1996; Gowdy 1998; Fitzhugh and Habu 2002; Fitzhugh 2003; Cummings et al. 2014; Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Ramseyer's hunter-gatherers are also strangely isolated; a few survive in the Amazon, Siberia and Southeast Asian jungles but ‘have had little contact with the modern world’ (2026: 170). In reality, almost all these groups have long histories of contact with the outside world (e.g., Forsyth 1992; Layton 2001; Morrison and Junker 2002). One exception, as Ramseyer notes, is North Sentinel Island in the Andamans which has apparently been isolated for centuries.⁴ Such extreme isolation is rare in human history.

In this section we discuss two related aspects of hunter-gatherer society and history that are especially problematic in Ramseyer's essay: (1) land use, territoriality and storage, and (2) violence.

3.1 Land use, territoriality and storage

Ramseyer (2026: 185) reluctantly admits that, ‘In some respects, the Ainu did plan ahead. … Their agricultural practices might indeed suggest such an approach. But at the very least, the Ainu understood that the salmon they captured during the spawning season would need to feed them through the winter.’ By definition, agriculture—even if conducted on a small scale—involves planning ahead, from planting to harvesting to storing the crops. But Ramseyer completely misunderstands the importance of storage amongst hunter-gatherers.

While Ramseyer (2026: 176) insists ‘“Ownership” is a legal term’, for anthropologists it is a type of territorial behaviour. Brown (1964) predicted that territorial maintenance would only be expected if the costs of resource defence were surpassed by the benefits of exclusive use. Human hunter-gatherers employ territoriality when the benefits from subsistence gains outweigh the costs of exclusionary defence (Cashdan 1983; Dyson-Hudson and Smith, 1978; Steward 1938; Tushingham and Bettinger 2019). Rather than land per se, hunter-gatherers are interested in defending resources, primarily food. Despite Ramseyer's spurious claim that they do not plan ahead, hunter-gatherers regularly engage in the storage of food, especially in environments with high seasonal variation. Ramseyer uses ‘inter-temporal substitution’ to refer to what hunter-gatherer specialists would term ‘delayed-return’ societies (Woodburn 1982). While in ‘immediate return’ systems food is not elaborately processed or stored for a long time, processing and storage are key to delayed-return economies (see also Testart 1982). The Japanese Islands are located in a seasonal, mid-latitude environment where delayed return systems were crucial for foragers (Sakaguchi 2009). At the same time, in immediate return societies ‘future discounting’ can be an adaptive mechanism to prevent the accumulation of wealth and social hierarchies (Salali and Migliano 2015).

If territoriality and storage defence are expected where the costs are less than losses due to theft when stores are not protected (Tushingham and Bettinger 2019), a crucial difference is between front- and back-loaded resources (Tushingham and Bettinger 2013). Front-loaded foods such as salmon are costly to procure but relatively easy to process. By contrast, back-loaded foods like acorns are more easily collected but require time-consuming preparation before they can be eaten. For this reason, front-loaded resources are more likely to be coveted by others since they can be consumed with little or no extra work. Whereas back-loaded resources had been common in the Jōmon period (Kawashima 2016), Ainu increasingly exploited front-loaded fish and animal products that were processed for trade as well as for local consumption. Given their subsistence base, the expectation that the Ainu would have high levels of territoriality is generally supported (Section 4.2).

The argument that Ainu (and other hunter-gatherers) were only ‘thinking of the present’ is also out of step with research on the evolution of human cognition (Raftopoulus 2025; Schultz 2025; Shaver and Hendin 1999). Ramseyer focuses on differences between subsistence technologies, but the ability to plan ahead is inherent in practices from weaving to cooking to tool making. Deferring gratification seems to be a plastic trait that humans variably employ based on numerous social, cultural and economic contexts (McClure et al. 2007; Salali and Migliano 2015). Human planning capabilities can also be seen in how human ancestors strung together complex learned tasks, necessitating language, when producing tools (Bruner 2018; Green and Spikins 2020; Metz et al. 2023; Stout 2011; Wadley 2020; Wynn and Coolidge 2016).

3.2 Violence

For Ramseyer ‘violence’ seems to serve as a code word for anti-social behaviour by lower class communities. Ramseyer (2020a) portrayed burakumin former outcastes in Japan as a ‘heavily criminal extortion machine’. Tracing their ancestry to a ‘loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers’, he claimed burakumin ‘were dysfunctional in ways that track under-class communities the world over’ (Ramseyer 2020a: 2). The violence of the upper class, by contrast, is ignored and broader issues of structural violence (Žižek 2008) hold no interest for Ramseyer. Despite his fascination with cost/benefit approaches, Ramseyer portrays hunter-gatherer violence as unremittingly negative.

Ramseyer's comments on hunter-gatherer violence draw primarily on Pinker (2011) and Chagnon (1988) and he ignores the specialist literature (e.g., Allen and Jones 2014; Fry 2007, 2013). Ramseyer distils Pinker's already reductionist arguments into a caricature. He tells us that ‘the logic is straightforward’, even that the ‘genetics are straightforward’ (2026: 167, 168). There is a large critical commentary on Pinker's Better Angels and it seems unnecessary here to rehearse the conclusion that violence is historically contingent (Dwyer and Damousi 2020; Dwyer and Micale 2022; Ferguson 2013).

Ramseyer (2026: 167) argues that more aggressive hunter-gatherer men mated with more women and had more children: ‘Necessarily, those offspring tended to share their father's aggression.’ Ramseyer supports this with Pinker's citation of work on the breeding of aggressive traits in mice.⁵ Such experiments have a long history (e.g., Lagerspetz 1964), but Pinker cites Cairns et al. (1990) and other Cairns group papers quoted therein. These experiments take a genetically heterogeneous mouse population and stage pair-wise conflicts using resident–intruder tests. The most aggressive males and females are then bred together to form a high-aggression line, while the least aggressive are selected to produce a low-aggression line. Pinker uses the results to argue that aggression is heritable. However, these experiments were forced, one-to-one encounters. The selection imposed was strong and in consistent directions (to ‘aggressive’ and ‘non-aggressive’) for four to five generations; the mice had no opportunity to display any other behaviour and it can be questioned whether this hard selection would occur in the wild. As there were no measurements of fitness, the experiments offer no support for the idea that aggressive mice produce more offspring. In the wild there may be countervailing factors that oppose selection for aggressiveness. For example, non-aggressive mice might be better mothers or (for hormonal reasons) aggressive mice might have lower conception or higher abortion rates. It is also not clear that selection experiments with mice are relevant to human societies. Ramseyer suggests aggressive humans have greater fitness (they mate with more females), but the mice were not tested for instances of mating (aggressive males and aggressive females were mated together).

Ramseyer (2026: 168) then uses Chagnon's (1988, 2013) ethnographic work to claim that aggressive humans have more children to whom genes for aggression are passed on. However, Chagnon's Yanomami evidence is problematic for several reasons (Lizot 1989; Ferguson 1995, 2015; Kopenawa and Albert 2013).⁶ Ferguson lists four main criticisms. First, although Ramseyer (2026: 167) insists that ‘Yanamamo men did not kill each other for food, much less over trade with modern merchants’, the Yanomami were not isolated but had long been impacted by missionaries, rubber traders, gold miners and displacement caused by colonialism. These external pressures increased conflict, contradicting Chagnon's claim that Yanomami warfare reflects innate human nature. Second, that the warfare was shaped by access to Western goods. Groups closer to missions or trading posts had more steel tools, which increased their power. Competition for these goods intensified raiding, making violence a historically specific phenomenon. Third, that Chagnon misunderstood the meaning of the term unokai, which is not limited to ‘individuals that killed’ but includes those who merely participated in raids. Killing itself does not cause reproductive success—status does. High status men are more likely to be involved in raids and to have more wives. Thus, status leads to more frequent participation in raids, leading to more status and, probably, more killing. More status leads to more wives and therefore, possibly, greater reproductive success. Fourth, that the ‘unokai effect’ may be an artefact of data collection. Chagnon's genealogies overcounted children of unokai because they were more prominent informants. The children of non-unokai men were less likely to be reported, creating a biased correlation.

There is no historical evidence that human violence grows incrementally in scale over generations. Rather, patterns of sudden shifts between violence and peace are common, including amongst hunter-gatherers (Burch 2005). If one were to take Ramseyer's logic and apply it evenly, then Japan's Warring States period (1467–1600)—with an estimated total of 2,889 battles at an average of 21 per year (Anderson 2023)—could be used to posit that the genetic composition of the population was changing to breed for violence. Yet, the subsequent Tokugawa period saw an extended period of peace, albeit with a distinctive culture of samurai violence (Vaporis 2020). If human violence was determined primarily by genes, there would be no reason to suspect that regimes of private land ownership would result in a decline in violent behaviour. In reducing violence to genes, Ramseyer has no clear explanation for why warfare has been so prevalent in agricultural societies. A further problem with arguing for some kind of ‘violent gene’ is that cooperation is inherent in human conflict (Bowles 2009, 2012; Bowles and Gintis 2011).

Ramseyer (2026: 187) acknowledges the ‘contact paradox’: ‘We cannot know how the hunter-gatherer societies functioned before people from literate societies approached them, because once they arrived the hunter-gatherers necessarily changed their behavior.’ Yet he presents a few examples of violence in Ainu society with no attempt to consider the broader historical context. Ramseyer ignores the fact that, for his essay, the most relevant example of a ‘pre-contact’ hunter-gatherer culture is the Jōmon, which was ancestral to the Ainu. Based on skeletal evidence, the Jōmon culture may have had low levels of violence during its long duration, despite periods of population and climatic stress, including from natural disasters (Matsumoto 2018; Nakagawa et al. 2017; Nakao et al. 2016; cf. Hudson 2021; Uchiyama et al. 2023). Such claims require further testing, yet the Jōmon were never isolated and were certainly not characterised by ‘violence all the way down’. Mirroring his claims that Ainu played no role in Hokkaido's economic success, Ramseyer frames the advent of Yayoi culture as driven entirely by migrants with little to no input from Jōmon people or culture, a claim not supported by evidence of sustained trading and contact, as well as hybridised settlement patterns and material culture (Barnes 2019; Fujio 2021; Hudson 2022b; Sahara 1987).

4 Placing the Ainu in history

Ramseyer's account of Ainu history, both before and after Japanese settler colonialism, shifts between caricature and misrepresentation. Although the pre-Meiji past of the Ainu is key to his narrative, he cites limited historical and archaeological sources. We lack real ethnographic accounts of the Ainu and it cannot be said that Watanabe (1972) is ‘an ethnography in the classic tradition of cultural anthropology’ (Ramseyer 2026: 177; cf. Hudson 2014: 123). Ramseyer (2026: 176) argues that because the Ainu did not practice agriculture, Hokkaido can be considered as terra nullius at the time of Japanese colonisation, a claim which misinterprets many complexities of Ainu history. The following discussion is divided into six sections examining Ainu origins, agriculture, ownership and territoriality, demography, violence and social trust, and ethnic identity.

4.1 Ainu origins

Ramseyer’s (2026: 180) summary of Ainu origins is based on ‘many standard histories in Japanese’ together with Zgusta (2015), yet the basic narrative is often unrecognisable. The Japanese archipelago, we are told, was settled by humans by 14,000 BCE, whereas 40,000 years ago has long been the standard chronology (Kaifu et al. 2015).⁷ Ramseyer links the settlement of the Americas with that of Japan. While the pathways and timing of the peopling of the Americas are questioned and contentious, the earliest evidence for humans in North America is found at White Sands National Park (New Mexico) and dates to approximately 23,000 cal BP (Bennett et al. 2021) and not to ca. 14,000 BCE as proposed by Ramseyer. While older literature—including the Hanihara and Ishida (2009) article cited by Ramseyer—does give 300 BCE for the start of the Yayoi, radiocarbon dating in the early 2000s pushed the chronology back to the 10th century BCE (Fujio 2021). Demographic growth is the main reason why Yayoi farmers expanded at the expense of Jōmon foragers (cf. Bellwood 2005; Bocquet-Appel 2011). We are unaware of any direct evidence that Jōmon people were killed by Yayoi farmers. That might have happened on occasion, but most Yayoi-period warfare—for which there is considerable evidence—was conducted between farming groups (Hudson et al. 2020). It is not true that ‘The Yayoi left the Jomon mostly alone on the northern end of Honshu Island (the Tohoku region) and Hokkaido Island’ or that ‘Until the 19th century, the Japanese government had largely ignored … Hokkaido’ (Ramseyer 2026: 180, 200). From the Yayoi period onwards, both the Tohoku and Hokkaido underwent profound cultural transformations, with trade a major driver (Harrison 1954; Tezuka 1998; Hudson 1999, 2004; Walker 2001; Segawa 2011, 2015). One of the earliest historical mentions of the Ainu is in the Nihon shoki in 659 when a male and female Emishi visited the Tang court together with representatives of the Yamato state (Aston 1972: II, 260–263; Komai 1964).

The Japanese state attempted raids on Hokkaido as early as the 7th century. The Nihon shoki recounts campaigns by Abe-no-Omi who was dispatched by empress Saimei (r. 655–661). According to the text, Emishi people probably located in Hokkaido asked for help against a large ‘Su-shen’ fleet (Aston 1972: II, 263–264). This account may over-emphasise the role of the Yamato kingdom in ‘protecting’ the ‘eastern barbarians’, yet is consistent with archaeological evidence for conflict between Okhotsk and Epi-Jōmon groups in the 7th century (Segawa 2011: 47–81). This in turn implies that the conflict arose over trading contacts and that the kings of Japan were trying to position themselves to control that trade. Finally, in comments that eschew any historical agency by the peoples involved, Ramseyer (2026: 180) writes that ‘Sometimes, the Nivkh and possibly other hunter-gatherers on Sakhalin expanded south into Hokkaido. And sometimes, the hunter-gatherers on Hokkaido expanded north into Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.’ The formation of the medieval Ainu diaspora around the Sea of Okhotsk in fact involved a very complex historical background that is ignored by Ramseyer.

4.2 Agriculture in Hokkaido

Ramseyer (2026: 156) paints a negative picture of the environment of Hokkaido, writing that ‘It was too cold and barren to grow rice, and too cold and barren to grow much else’. Crawford (1983, 2008) has long discussed the possibility that Jōmon groups in Hokkaido cultivated plants. The earliest evidence for domesticated cereals in Hokkaido comes from Rebun Island where barley (Hordeum vulgare) was found at the Hamanaka 2 site in an Okhotsk culture context. Thirteen direct radiocarbon dates on barley samples span some 500 years from c. 430 to 960 (Leipe et al. 2017). Leipe and colleagues argue that the barley was likely grown on Rebun rather than being traded in. Two other radiocarbon dates on barley come from the Okhotsk Menashidomari site with calibrated dates (95.4% probability) of 664–827 (IAAA-52384) and 680–950 (Beta-213177). Three Okhotsk sites in Hokkaido have produced remains of broomcorn and foxtail millet (Yamada 2006). Lipid analysis of Middle Okhotsk pottery from Hamanaka also found evidence for the processing of millet (Junno et al. 2020). Domesticated pigs are known from at least six Okhotsk sites in Hokkaido; DNA evidence supports the conclusion that these pigs were introduced via Sakhalin (Watanobe et al. 2001).

Between the late 7th and 9th centuries, groups from northern Honshu crossed to Hokkaido bringing cereal agriculture to the Ishikari plain, as well as iron tools, spindle whorls, clay kamado ovens and pottery forms influenced by Japanese Haji wares. This resulted in a hybrid culture known as the Satsumon (c. 700–1200). The Sakushu-Kotoni River site in Sapporo has an extensive record of Satsumon cultigens (Crawford and Yoshizaki 1987). However, Satsumon societies as a whole did not become organised around agricultural production (Ōnishi 2014). From the medieval era, cereals became widely traded into Hokkaido. In 1613, English merchant John Saris (1941: 245–246) learnt that rice, cotton and iron were traded in exchange for ‘Salmon, and dried fish of sundrie sortes, and other wares’ including ‘silver and sand gould’. This trade generated large profits for the Matsumae domain which controlled the Wajinchi enclave of Japanese settlement in southwest Hokkaido. Even when tens of thousands of people were dying of starvation during the famines that struck the Tohoku region at regular intervals, the Matsumae could afford to import rice from unaffected areas as far south as Kyushu (Howell 1995: 58).

Historical records demonstrate that a range of crops was grown in early modern Hokkaido, including rice, foxtail, broomcorn and barnyard millet, wheat, barley, sorghum, maize, buckwheat, soy and azuki beans, radish, carrot, burdock, ginger, pumpkin, aubergine, water melon, Perilla, tobacco, hemp, sesame, and others (Yamamoto 1996). Most of these records relate to the Wajinchi, but Ainu were also involved in raising several cultigens. Barnyard and foxtail millet were the most important Ainu crops (Hayashi 1975). The Ainu had words for these plants—munciro ‘foxtail millet’ and piyapa ‘barnyard millet’. Both plant names appear in the Ezo kotoba, one of the earliest Japanese-Ainu dictionaries, dating from 1704 (Kūnen 2010: 195). While munciro has no external source (and is therefore a native Ainu word), piyapa shows potential influence from Japanese hie ‘barnyard millet’.

Full-scale agricultural settlement of Hokkaido by farmers occurred after 1869, long after the main islands of Japan underwent the transition to farming. However, this was not because Hokkaido was ‘too cold and barren’. There is no evidence for Ramseyer’s (2026: 182) claim that the soil in Hokkaido is less fertile than the rest of Japan (Nakatsuji et al. 2021). Hokkaido certainly possessed a much more productive agricultural environment than the Ryukyu Islands in the south (cf. Smits 2024: 137–155). Jarosz et al. (2022) examined three reasons for the spread of farming to the Ryukyus: demographic growth, trade, and the expansion of the Japanese state. Mainland Japan saw population growth over the medieval and early modern periods but that did not lead directly to a farming dispersal to Hokkaido. Instead, Hokkaido was exploited through trade. By the Tokugawa era, that trade was strictly controlled by the shogunate and its Matsumae proxies. Many of the products obtained from Hokkaido were prestige goods but by the 18th century the use of dried herring as a fertilizer became important to Japanese agriculture (Howell 1995; Totman 1993). The emphasis on trade in the Hokkaido economy led to conflicts between the labour demands of fishing and farming, and the Japanese began to institute measures to limit Ainu cultivation so that they could devote more time to hunting and fishing (Yamamoto 1996: 115; Takakura 1960: 38; Morris-Suzuki 1994: 21–22).

4.3 Ownership and territoriality

With respect to Ainu territoriality, Ramseyer (2026: 177) states that he relies on Watanabe (1972) but ignores much of the information contained therein on ownership. In a chapter titled ‘Territories and gathering areas’, Watanabe (1972: 56–68) distinguished two types of territory of the Hokkaido Ainu, one utilised exclusively by a river group (Petunkur, ‘people of the river’), the other comprising smaller clusters of defendable resources therein. Entry to another river group's territory required permission from the neighbouring headman and was ‘a formal permission accompanied with a rigid ritual procedure’ (Watanabe 1972: 57). Ainu land management practices provided a way to maintain access to necessary resources. New territories within the valley were only sought when old ones became unproductive, and if a group moved elsewhere its territorial claims came to an end (Watanabe 1972: 62).

Ramseyer portrays people who lack land ownership as irrational and primitive, yet communal sharing was a rational and stable adaptation for hunter-gatherers. Ainu exercised sovereignty over each river-grouping and violators were handled through culturally-sanctioned trials known as caranke. While Ramseyer finds Ainu violence ‘gratuitous’, it demonstrates the costs involved in defending territory and resources. These observations bring us to perhaps the most interesting aspect of Ainu territoriality—the historical relationship between intensive and expansive territorialism. Ethnographic accounts from the 20th century, such as Watanabe (1972), depict a pattern focused on local ‘river groups’ and corresponding in many respects to what Tushingham and Bettinger (2019) call ‘intensive territorialism’. Historical records from the early modern Tokugawa period appear consistent with this pattern (cf. Walker 2001). Yet earlier periods had seen Ainu populations move from Hokkaido to Sakhalin and then the Kuril Islands (Hudson 2017), a phenomenon that would seem to correspond to Tushingham and Bettinger's ‘extensive territorialism’. The drivers of this shift require further research.

4.4 Demography

While Ramseyer (2026: 156) claims that ‘Only the Ainu survived on the island’, there had been a large Japanese population in Hokkaido since medieval times. Most Japanese lived on the Oshima peninsula in the southwest; after 1550 this was fixed as the official area of Japanese settlement (Wajinchi). The population of this enclave was high. Between 1701 and 1853, the Wajinchi Japanese population increased from 20,086 to 63,834 (Seki and Kuwabara 1995: 73–74). Ainu population data are less reliable, but a figure of around 22,000 exists from 1804; by 1854 this had decreased to 15,171 (Seki and Kuwabara 1995: 36; see also Hatano 1981). Already by the 18th century, therefore, there were as many Japanese as Ainu living in Hokkaido. On a Eurasian scale, it is worth noting the sheer size of the Wajinchi colonial enclave. In 1830, India had a European population of between 40 and 50,000 (Marshall 1990: 29), a comparable or likely lower number than the Japanese settlers of the Wajinchi at the same time despite the vast difference in geographic scale.⁸ By the end of the Tokugawa era, the Japanese population of Hokkaido was more than four times larger than the Ainu. The population of Japan at the Meiji Restoration is estimated at around 30 million, although the exact figure remains a matter of substantial scholarly debate (Hayami 2009: 132–133). While Ramseyer muses that Ainu had more of a ‘fair chance’ than other Indigenous peoples (who were subject to expressly genocidal campaigns), the demographic imbalance is striking. In the first three decades of colonisation, the settler Japanese population of Hokkaido increased from 60,000 to just over two million (Thornton 2022: 573).

4.5 Violence and social trust

Ramseyer (2026: 185–189) accepts that some Ainu violence was aimed at ‘policing territory’ but spends more pages discussing what he terms ‘gratuitous violence’, defined as ‘violence unrelated to any effort to stop outsiders from hunting or fishing on one's territory.’ From the examples he provides, however, it is impossible to distinguish between the two types, even if the latter were considered a viable category. Ramseyer's descriptions of Ainu violence come primarily from missionary John Batchelor (1855–1944) and from Japanese government reports from 1918 to 1933. These sources require careful criticism to be used as accounts of violence in Ainu history. Ramseyer (2026: 185–186) emphasises two points about Ainu violence: that it involved ‘astonishing … lethality’ and that it was commonplace because Ainu lacked a system to delegate enforcement of laws or rules to the community as a whole. With regard to the first point, the sources cited by Ramseyer (which are keen to support colonial Japan's mission civilisatrice) cannot be used as evidence for the numbers of casualties in Ainu conflicts. The second point is contradicted by many of the accounts wherein whole villages responded to threats or attacks

Ramseyer (2026: 200) argues that, because the Japanese had been farmers for ‘2000 years’—in fact it was 3000—they understood ‘the importance of developing a reputation for honesty in commercial transactions, and the benefits to delegating legal enforcement to the state.’ He writes that in contrast to hunter-gatherers ‘the farmer in an agricultural society does not enhance his evolutionary fitness by fighting with his neighbors. Instead, he enhances his fitness by increasing his range of advantageous trading opportunities’ (Ramseyer 2026: 168).⁹ He further proposes that ‘Observing potential gains from trade, [farmers] will learn to cooperate with their neighbors and develop reputations for keeping their word’ (2026: 164).¹⁰ These claims fail on both theoretical and empirical grounds. If violence is genetically heritable, as Ramseyer insists, there is no reason for it to disappear due to ‘honest commerce’. There is growing evidence that violence was not only commonplace in early farming societies but may have increased in frequency compared to preceding hunter-gatherers (Fibiger et al. 2023; Hudson et al. 2020; Smith et al. 2020). Few early states had a monopoly on violence. A common approach to reducing endemic violence was protection by military specialists (knights or samurai), yet the balance of power between such specialists was easily broken. North et al. (2009: 30) write that ‘A natural state manages the problem of violence by forming a dominant coalition that limits access to valuable resources—land, labor, and capital—or access to and control of valuable activities—such as trade, worship, and education—to elite groups.’ Property rights under such regimes thus become a type of systemic violence.

Ramseyer connects trust in commercial relations to institutions, but ‘Achieving compliance with institutions requires insuring that participants have a voice in the decisions, receive their share in payoffs, and are punished justly for failing to abide by the rules made by developing infrastructure or corporate power structures’ (Fargher and Blanton 2021: 160). For instance, while medieval Venice was known for its widespread trust in mercantile relations, that trust ‘was not an inherent factor: it had to be created and cultivated’ (Pezzolo 2014: 282–283; see also Fargher-Navarro 2025). The Ainu were largely excluded from the collective action of institution building and, in their commercial dealings with the Ainu, the Japanese lacked a reputation for honesty. In 1669, growing friction over trade led to a major Ainu revolt known as Shakushain's War. The causes of the war were complex and included conflict between Ainu groups over trade dependencies and their impacts on ecology and value systems (Walker 2001). However, investigations by the shogunate demonstrated that Matsumae's exploitation of the Ainu was a major factor. The Yoichi Ainu complained that ‘If, for example, one string of shellfish is missing from a bundle, the Matsumae make us pay twenty strings of shellfish the next year as interest. If we do not pay, our children are taken instead’ (Walker 2001: 68). In claiming that farming results in honesty, Ramseyer reproduces the Neo-Confucian prejudices of the Tokugawa regime where farmers were characterised by ‘honest poverty’ (Haga 2021) while merchants were considered to leach their profits off virtuous peasants (Vlastos 1998).

Ramseyer's assumption that the medieval Ainu diaspora involved violence against other Indigenous groups also needs to be examined carefully against historical and archaeological records. Before Ainu spread to the Kurils, the islands had been largely uninhabited for around two centuries (Fitzhugh et al. 2016). Multiple Ainu raids on Sakhalin are reported in Chinese histories (Wada 1938) prior to Ainu settlement of the island (Nakamura 1991, 1999). Yet records from the 18th century onwards describe long-term trade relations between Ainu and other peoples of Sakhalin and the Amur (Shiraishi and Tangiku 2022; Shiratori 1951). The level of influence that their languages had upon each other (Gusev 2015; Yamada 2017) requires sustained and regular contact (Thomason 2009); the same also applies to contact between the bearers of the Okhotsk culture and speakers of an ancestral form of the Ainu language (Knapen and Hudson 2026). These observations would be very difficult to explain if interethnic relations on Sakhalin were characterised by nothing but violent conflict.

4.6 Ethnic identity

Ramseyer makes the extraordinary assertion that after 1869 the Ainu ceased to exist. He tells us that ‘When the Japanese government adopted the new [Meiji] legal regime, the Ainu seem largely to have been unable to exploit it. Instead, they mostly married other Japanese and disappeared’ and that ‘The most ambitious left the Ainu areas and ceased—in effect—to be Ainu at all’ (Ramseyer 2026: 156, 181). These statements contradict everything known about modern Ainu history. Moreover, Ramseyer misunderstands ethnic identity formation and the complexity of how Ainu negotiate multi-ethnic lineages in Japan historically and at present (lewallen 2016b). Despite colonialism and long struggles for official recognition as the Indigenous people of Japan, Ainu have retained a strong sense of ethnic identity, as discussed by numerous writers: Siddle (1996), Watson (2014), lewallen (2016a), Grunow et al. (2019) and Ang (2026) are a few representative works in English. Given widespread social discrimination, some Ainu have attempted to hide their heritage, at least in certain contexts, but that cannot be construed as evidence that they ‘disappeared’ (Ishihara 2019). The United States government recognised the Ainu as Indigenous in the 1911 North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, which included a clause stating that the ‘Convention shall not apply to Indians, Ainos [Ainu], Aleuts, or other aborigines dwelling on the coast of the waters mentioned in Article I’.¹¹ That the Japanese government continued to recognise the Ainu as a separate people is clear from Ramseyer's Table 1, which lists Ainu population totals. If the Ainu had ‘ceased to exist’, who was the Japanese government counting in these figures? With the exception of 1885, the numbers show a stable, even slightly increasing Ainu population until after 1915 (Figure 2).¹² For Ramseyer, ethnic identity is connected directly to government subsidies but the Ainu example shows clearly that his reasoning is flawed: since Ainu continue to maintain a strong sense of ethnic identity, their ‘disappearance’ cannot be attributed to an absence of government financial support (Supplementary Information).

5 Modernisation and its discontents: putting Meiji in its place

Ramseyer assumes a stability in the transition from Tokugawa to Meiji that does not reflect the historical record or the conclusions of historians of the period. The 1868 Meiji Restoration was arguably the most important political event in Japan's 19th-century transition from early modern warrior polity to modern nation-state. Before Meiji, Tokugawa Japan attained a measure of social and political cohesion; however, structural weaknesses within the system, intensified by growing pressure from foreign encroachment, ultimately precipitated its collapse. In early Meiji, authority was consolidated through civil war into the hands of lower-ranking warriors from powerful regional domains. The new regime then implemented sweeping social, political, economic and cultural reforms through state policy and decree.

From 1869, when Hokkaido was forcibly incorporated into the Japanese state, far-reaching changes of settler colonialism, modernisation and industrialisation began to sweep over that island. Ramseyer reduces these impacts to one issue—land ownership. He writes that ‘Over most of Japan, men and women quickly learned to exploit the opportunities presented by the new legal system’ (2026: 153). In reality, it was exactly the contested issue of land ownership that generated some of the most fractious social problems of the age. That this phenomenon was not limited to Japan is clear from our discussion of Italy, which established a modern state a few years before Meiji. In this section we examine the Japanese colonisation of Hokkaido, the impact of colonialism on Ainu hunter-gathering, the effects of modernisation on Meiji Japan, and conclude with comparative comments on Italy.

5.1 Meiji colonisation of Hokkaido

Ramseyer argues that while the Ainu, due to their hunter-gatherer heritage, found it impossible to adapt to the Meiji legal system, the Japanese found that same transition easy since they were accustomed to social structures associated with agriculture, notably land ownership. He insists that ‘The innovation and investment that would eventually transform Hokkaido came … with immigrants from the rest of Japan’ and not from the Ainu (Ramseyer 2026: 153). While Ramseyer makes the exploitation of Hokkaido by the Meiji Japanese sound like a smooth, ‘natural’ process, it was actually a top-down, state-directed undertaking aided by foreign advisors who helped the Japanese adapt to the very different climate of Hokkaido. The potential threat from Russia was a key reason why the Meiji government decided to colonise Hokkaido. The Kaitakushi (Hokkaido Colonial Office) was established with an enormous budget in 1869 to oversee colonisation with agriculture central to its policy.

Meiji and later settler colonisation of Hokkaido can be divided into three phases. The first was marked by strong interventionist policies by the Japanese government, including support for Western agricultural practices and technologies. The second was a reaction to official policy as Japanese immigrants attempted to revert to more traditional styles of mainland farming. The third stage formed a synthesis, with the diversification of Hokkaido's economy into dairy, vegetables and industry. Though agricultural production did not exceed fisheries until 1900, by the late 20th century Hokkaido had become a major centre of Japanese farming (Takaoka 1904: 88; Berque 1980: 78).

Meiji regulations assigned most unoccupied land in Hokkaido as private property but Ainu territory was taken as state land (Yoshida 2014: 61). Ravina (2017: 175) notes the many contradictions in colonial policy towards Hokkaido. Immigration was subsidised but the first Japanese settlers were assigned the poorest lands. More fertile lands were often sold to speculators. A corruption scandal over the sale of government land in Hokkaido in 1881 was an important factor in popular demands for a constitution and parliament (Huffman 2010: 81). From 1875, an agrarian militia brought disbanded samurai to Hokkaido in an attempt to combine agricultural settlement with defence against possible Russian incursions. Known as the tondenhei, this militia did little to stimulate general colonisation by Japanese farmers. Private companies also encouraged immigration. The Banseisha company was established in 1882 and operated for fifty years, promoting colonisation of the Tokachi region. Although agriculture was central to Meiji colonial policy, the migration of fishermen to Hokkaido continued and Japanese fisheries spread north to Sakhalin, the Kurils and Kamchatka. Some 8,890 Japanese are recorded to have been working in Kamchatka during the fishing season in the early 20th century (Forsyth 1992: 223).

Economic hardships resulting from crop failures, together with changing patterns of land ownership, provided a ‘push’ factor for Japanese peasants to migrate north. Nevertheless, although the Tohoku region had become ‘acutely and chronically poverty-stricken’ (Irokawa 1985: 219), Japanese farmers were initially reluctant to move to Hokkaido. This surprised Western advisors. American Horace Capron could not help thinking that ‘considering Hokkaido's conditions and resources … “the settlement of Yesso [Hokkaido] were an easy matter, had we to deal with the hardy people who settled America.”’ (Fujita 1994: 24). Capron proposed ‘a Japanese version of … allotment and land redistribution policies for Indian Territory set out in the US Homestead Act of 1862’ (Hirano 2023: 139) but ignored the fact that European colonisation of North America had been a long and difficult process. The survival of many early settlers in New England relied on their adoption of Native American crops. Fujita (1994: 131) suggests that ‘The Japanese in general, cherishing ties with their relatives and their communities, were not willing to leave for the unknown, and farmers in particular did not want to settle where they could not grow rice.’ Major adaptations—ranging from farming practices to heating, house construction and winter transportation—were needed before the Japanese could live comfortably in Hokkaido. The occupation of Hokkaido was also facilitated by dietary changes in the rest of Japan, notably increasing consumption of dairy products.

Other regions of Japan were also subject to Meiji agricultural colonisation. Over thirty new farms were established between 1878 and 1928 in Nasuno-ga-hara (Tochigi), involving the migration of nearly 200 families from other prefectures. As in Hokkaido, conditions for these settlers were brutal. The Meiji government initially encouraged the use of Western farm implements and these were used on at least eleven farms in Tochigi in the 1880s. With a few exceptions, however, their use was discontinued in the following decade as farmers resorted to traditional, small-scale cultivation practices. In Hokkaido, by contrast, agriculture developed closer to imported Western models (Kanai 1990, 1993; Otake 1993).

The Meiji government's decision to make agriculture the mainstay of the Hokkaido colonial regime led to a complete turn-around in social relations between Japanese and Ainu. Instead of their previous role as professional foragers, Ainu were now encouraged to become farmers and their traditional hunting and fishing practices were prohibited. The failure of agricultural promotion policies is attributed to inadequate understanding by Japanese bureaucrats of Ainu settlement and subsistence patterns, as well as to low levels of government funding (Siddle 1996).

5.2 Colonisation and Ainu hunter-gathering

Ramseyer argues that Ainu foraging practices were incompatible with Meiji colonial rule and needed to be controlled or banned. He accuses Western scholars such as lewallen cited in Grunow et al. (2019) and Howell (2005) of ‘missing the context’ of traditional Ainu hunting and fishing (2026: 194), but his own account is problematic because it ignores the fact that Japan's colonial regime attempted to destroy traditional Ainu lifeways in order to confiscate the means of production rather than any objective ‘incompatibility’. Ramseyer (2026: 194) inaccurately writes that ‘The Ainu had hunted deer and bears primarily by setting concealed spring bows loaded with poisoned arrows.’ Spring bows and other traps were in fact used to catch small animals such as sable (Deriha 2014). Deer and bears were not usually hunted with traps, although poison might be applied to arrows and spears. Ramseyer further claims that Ainu hunting and fishing needed to be regulated because it was not sustainable. As discussed in our Supplementary Information, this is a misrepresentation on several levels.

5.3 Meiji and the modernisation of Japan

Ramseyer dismisses the radical social transformations that occurred in Meiji Japan. The causes, consequences and broader historical significance of these changes remain subjects of sustained scholarly exploration and debate. To point out one of the more obvious seismic transformations, Japan witnessed a dramatic shift in how it viewed its working population. The Neo-Confucian ideology of the Tokugawa had valorised peasants in the belief that ‘merchants enriched themselves and impoverished others by their trade, while farmers supported the whole society by producing food and fiber to feed and clothe the entire population’ (Vlastos 1998: 81). Meiji Japan now encouraged industrial capitalism and, like most industrialising states, subsidised industry by taxing agriculture (Mann 2012: 103). Walker (2015: 182) notes that ‘Between 1875 and 1879, over 80 per cent of the Meiji government's revenue derived from brutal land taxes. Between 1882 and 1892 that number increased to 85 per cent.’ The Land Tax Reform of 1873 recognised the right of farmers to own land rather than just to cultivate it for the local lord. The land tax was paid in cash but the market value of rice fluctuated considerably, meaning that many peasants were forced to sell their land and become tenants (Hirano 2015: 198; Mann 2012: 103; Walker 2015: 182). Rural discontent stemming from land dispossession was already a problem in the late Tokugawa (Scheiner 1998), but rural riots became ‘endemic’ to early Meiji (Walker 2015: 183). During 1866 riots over food shortages, one village headman explained that the rioters ‘had come to hate men of property’ (Huffman 2010: 74). Yukichi Fukazawa wrote in 1874 that ‘The purpose [of government] seems to be to use the fruits of rural labour to make flowers for Tokyo’ (Walker 2015: 185). The Matsutaka deflation (1881–85) led to further distress and, in 1884, to riots and disturbances (Walker 2015: 183). By the time of the First World War, ‘agrarian populists bitterly criticized the values, culture, and social relations of industrial capitalism. Appalled by the uneven development of the countryside, capitalism's inhumane social relations, and the moral corruption of “great Tokyo”, they vehemently criticized Japan's trajectory of modern development’ (Vlastos 1998: 80).

The intensity and unpredictably of the Meiji transformation of Japanese lives has been pointed out by generations of scholars and, in recent decades, demonstrated in relation to intellectual currents (Morris-Suzuki 1998), systems of punishment (Botsman 2005), death (Bernstein 2006), sex work (Mihalopoulos 2011), gender (Karlin 2014) and poverty (Huffman 2018), to list only several areas that were profoundly impacted. To rehearse a story of the transition to Japan's modernity that fails to account for these complex changes is to seriously misrepresent the past. As Gluck (1997: 574) reminds us, ‘Becoming modern is a process, and the process was uneven and unsettling to live through. Rapid institutional change of the sort that took place after the [Meiji] Restoration was like a tectonic shift in the ground of social existence.’ Within those processes of channelling and institutionalising change, moreover, certain inequalities in relation to marginalised groups were exploited, reinscribed and compounded through the actions of the Japanese state (among other actors) in ways that restricted or cut off certain future historical trajectories.

5.4 Land ownership and resilience in modern Italy: some comparative comments

Ramseyer's claim that the Japanese accepted modernity with minimal disturbance is not supported by historical evidence. Nowhere in the world did people face industrialisation, let alone colonialism, without disruption and struggle. A comparison with Italy is instructive. Unified as modern nation-states at the same time, in both Italy and Japan modernisation had similar destructive impacts on traditional rural life. If the merchant communities of northern Italy had formed one of the most affluent groups in medieval Europe (Pezzolo 2014), in the 19th century peasants became looked down upon as a hindrance to modernisation. For Northern Italians, Southern peasants were ‘semi-colonial, indeed “African”, [and an] “internal other”’ (Beales and Biagini 2002: 164). In the South of Italy agriculture was often interdependent on sheep and goat transhumance, and ‘Seasonal access to feudal estates, the right to graze and farm on the village commons and to exercise customary rights such as gleaning, collecting firewood, or hunting on the open land and woodlands were critical to the economy’ (Davis 2000: 237). North and Thomas’ (1973: 4) complaint that the absence of private property meant that ‘A landowner who carefully prepared and grew a crop might expect at any moment to have it eaten or trampled by flocks of migrating sheep’ misses the complex customary rights that typically accompanied such systems. Already by the second half of the 18th century, rulers in Southern Italy began to expand private property and commercial farming at the expense of customary limits on enclosures (Davis 2000: 237), a process linked to social conflict and the exclusion of poorer peasants from the land (Mascolo 2021). Crucially, this was not merely a top-down imposition from the North: local Southern elites—the so-called signori—mediated these liberal reforms to consolidate their own power, transforming communal assets into private holdings (Lupo 1998).

Brigandage and insurgency continued in the South for a decade after unification and required large numbers of troops to suppress. Changes in land ownership were the main cause of this unrest (Lupo 1998; Beales and Biagini 2002: 157; Evans 2016: 109–110; Mascolo 2021). As in Meiji Japan, Italian peasants blamed landowners. One brigand leader stated that ‘The signori are the root of this evil business, but we are the ones who pay the price’ (Evans 2016: 109–110). The European agricultural depression of the 1880s brought further hardship and emigration to America started in earnest. Some 11 million Italians, mainly from the South, emigrated between 1880 and 1914 (Davis 2000: 239).

Matera in the far south of Italy illustrates these processes with particular clarity. Traditional transhumance relying on common grazing already began to decline in the late 18th century, a trend that accelerated in the 19th century as Australian wool collapsed the economic basis of the local agropastoral system and the institutional protections that had regulated grazing rights were abolished (Bernardo and De Pascale 2016a: 26). This fundamental breakdown of a sophisticated socio-ecological equilibrium is seen in the Sassi old town of Matera, which had functioned as an architectural ‘oasis of stone’ with a delicate water cycle (Laureano 2019: 53–55). The expansion of modern Matera across the plateau disrupted this capillary network by burying communal granaries and cisterns beneath new buildings, severing the city's vital link to its environment (Laureano 2019: 58). This interruption of a functional ecosystem—rather than mere historical obsolescence—triggered the sanitary crisis that led to the city's labelling as a ‘national shame’ (Bernardo and De Pascale 2016b: 63).

The transhumance routes (tratturi) that structured this economy were grassy tracks, typically 111 m wide, classified since medieval times as public demesne assets connecting montane and lowland pastures across Basilicata and Puglia (Esposito et al. 2012: 141–142; Pellicano 2023: 242–243). Their decline was not an accident of progress but a result of institutional neglect and the progressive alienation of state infrastructure. As late as 2012, only around 1,149 km of the original 3,112 km tratturi network remained intact, the rest having been lost to enclosure, road construction and agricultural conversion (Esposito et al. 2012: 143). What Valorani (2025) describes as a ‘millenary co-evolutionary’ heritage had been effectively dismantled. Contemporary governance continues to mirror past indifference; Basilicata still lacks a strategic framework for the ‘active conservation’ of this heritage, with regional legislation often limited to administrative management rather than territorial planning (Vigliotti 2025: 512). This governance failure reflects a broader, persistent inability to integrate traditional pastoral routes into modern strategic development, effectively continuing the process of marginalisation.

Carlo Levi’s 1945 novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli documents how Matera's peasants were regarded by the Italian state as racially and culturally backward (Levi 1982)—a judgement strikingly similar to late 19th-century characterisations of the Ainu as a ‘dying race’ doomed by their primitiveness. In both cases, what was presented as cultural inferiority was in reality the consequence of deliberate dispossession. The crisis in Matera peaked in 1952 when Prime Minister De Gasperi ordered the forced evacuation of the Sassi (Bernardo and De Pascale 2016a, 2016b). The later revitalisation of Matera—culminating in its 1993 inscription as UNESCO World Heritage and 2019 designation as European Capital of Culture (Bernardo and De Pascale 2016b)—demonstrates that these communities were never inherently incapable of flourishing; they had simply been denied the conditions to do so. Matera thus shows how the resilience of traditional economies—like that of the Ainu—can be destroyed by outside forces, especially those relating to land use and ownership. Contra Ramseyer, neither the Japanese nor the Italians simply and smoothly embraced the legal institutions of modernity; for the poor and marginalised, those institutions were as often instruments of dispossession as of opportunity.

6 Discussion

Hunting, gathering and fishing of wild resources have sustained humans for most of their existence. The sharing of food—sometimes as ‘tolerated theft’ (Blurton-Jones 1984)—was a key reason why this adaptation was so stable and long-lasting. Human behavioural ecology helps us understand the evolutionary problems involved in the transition from foraging to farming. Ownership of resources comes with defence costs, and land is usually the costliest resource in that respect. For much of history humans have attempted to reduce such costs in order to increase their evolutionary fitness. Following North and Thomas (1970), Ramseyer (2026: 155) claims private ownership of land provides an incentive to investments that ‘generate positive returns for society at large’. He continues that ‘In order to increase aggregate welfare, individuals need to understand the concept of investment, and to be willing to delay present gratification for the sake of greater future consumption. They need the ability and willingness to recognize that not consuming something now might let them consume more later’ (2026: 165). Premodern states were not organised in that way. Those states attempted to concentrate or ‘cage’ populations in core areas in order to extract surpluses for the exclusive use of elites (Mann 1986; Scott 2017); elites also used slavery and manipulated markets to extract wealth (Blanton and Feinman 2025). In early state societies, land came increasingly under the control of supra-household units, cementing social inequalities which led to growing monopolisation of land by elites (Mann 1986: 82–89). This process may have begun as early as the Bronze Age when the introduction of the plough made it possible for one person to farm larger areas of land, generating a growing class of dispossessed labourers (Goody 1971, 2004: 5).

If Ramseyer’s (2026) arguments were correct, hunter-gatherers should rapidly adopt farming with minimal disturbance. There are few examples of such a trajectory, precisely because foraging was such a stable socio-economic system. There is no evidence that the advent of agriculture was associated with an immediate, universal shift in resource and land defence behaviour. The costs of defending land ownership remained high and stored agricultural products were a new attraction for neighbouring groups. This was no doubt one cause of the widespread evidence for violent conflict in early agricultural societies. A range of different property systems was found in premodern farming societies (e.g., Firth 1965; Mann 1986: 50–53). At Çatalhöyük in Turkey around 9000 years ago, different systems co-existed whereby farmed goods were stored in private, difficult-to-access spaces whereas hunted products were displayed in public areas (Bogaard et al. 2009). In their ethnographic study of the Ache of Paraguay, Kaplan and Hill (1985) similarly describe how hunted and gathered resources are widely shared while purchased or produced goods are less likely to be shared outside the immediate family. If for hunter-gatherers the challenge had been to defend stored resources, land ownership generated new risks. Now the land itself could be purchased (often under unequal conditions exacerbated by war or colonialism) or simply stolen. Hin (2013: 7) writes that Roman elites preferred landownership as a means of economic gain and, according to Tainter and Crumley (2007: 64), ‘By AD 400 most of Gaul and Italy were owned by about 20 senatorial families.’ Social theory from classical times onwards has explored problems deriving from unequal ownership of the means of production, including land. According to Appian (c. 95 – c. 165), the people of Italy were impoverished ‘because the rich owned the land and used slaves as farm workers instead of free men’ (Hin 2013: 19). North (1973: 19) notes that when land was abundantly available, as in early medieval Europe, it was ‘not worth the cost of devising exclusive rights to its use.’ The absence of exclusive ownership rights to land characterises what Wickham (2005: 305) calls the ‘peasant mode of production’. Common lands were important in most, if not all, agricultural systems until growing enclosure in modern times. When commons were lost, peasants became impoverished (Scott 1976; Persson 2010: 75). Ramseyer (2026: 167) argues that ‘modern legal systems were designed’ for the ‘dense communities characteristic of agricultural and capitalist societies’. However, it was only with modern nation-states and legal systems that the world imagined by Ramseyer became possible.

As we have discussed at length, Ramseyer's claim that aggression was strongly selected for in hunter gatherers is not supported by the evidence. The claim relies on an overstated picture of forager violence, an inappropriate analogy to mouse breeding, a simplistic view of aggression as a heritable trait, and a misunderstanding of how modern foragers relate to prehistoric ones. Human aggression is shaped by culture, ecology and social structure, and only partly by genetics.

As noted in our introduction, ‘growth’ is a key element in Ramseyer's narrative but is not discussed in detail. ‘Economic growth’ is, of course, a relatively new term and was not widely used until the 1950s (O’Bryan 2009; Schmelzer 2024). A historical analysis such as that proposed by Ramseyer needs to take account of changing views of growth—and its limits. Jones (1988) distinguishes between extensive and intensive growth and argues that the latter was the more significant (though historically much rarer) trend. Other scholars have explored much older cycles of growth (see e.g., Frank and Gills 1993; Warburton 2022). How economic growth connects with the broader phenomenon of socio-ecological acceleration is also a topic requiring further research (cf. Ellis 2023; Izdebski et al. 2025).

Ainu people have a long and rich history that developed in contact with the Japanese and other neighbouring peoples, yet which needs to be understood in its own terms. Ainu history cannot be reduced to the 19th century colonial tropes uncritically reproduced by Ramseyer. The history of Japan is also complex and Meiji was one of the most dramatic periods of change in the archipelago. Everywhere modernisation had its winners and losers. If the Ainu fared badly under Japanese colonialism, it was far from the case that all Japanese profited from the sweeping changes of the Meiji era. Transformations to land use and ownership were especially burdensome and, as discussed in Section 5.3, this was by no means a problem limited to Japan. Bauman (2004) argues that, by its very nature, capitalist modernity builds ‘wasted lives’. The iconic writings of folklorist Kunio Yanagita, particularly his 1910 stories of rural poverty and distress in Tōno monogatari (Yanagita 2008), show that Meiji Japan was no exception.

7 Conclusions

Ramseyer (2026) proposes that because hunter-gatherers lack concepts of land ownership and were ‘relentlessly violent’, they could not take advantage of ‘rational’ legal institutions introduced by colonising powers. Farmers, by contrast, had lower levels of inter-personal violence and appreciated the importance of private ownership of land and ‘delayed gratification’, thus promoting acceptance of colonial legal and social regimes. We have shown that, both as general evolutionary theory and as a specific application to Japanese and Ainu history, these arguments cannot be supported. Complex human cognitive behaviour has deep roots in Africa (Scerri and Will 2023) and Ramseyer’s (2026: 200) suggestion that ‘Hunter-gatherers do not bring the intellectual and social resources necessary to exploit the opportunities that a rational institutional framework might provide’ is contradicted by the rich social and cultural lives of many hunter-gatherers (e.g., Ames and Maschner 1999; Kawashima 2008, 2010; Kobayashi 2004; Cummings et al. 2014; Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Table 1 summarises our main conclusions.

Table 1. Main conclusions of the present study.

Finally, we note that although Ramseyer (2026) is ultimately concerned with big historical issues relating to capitalism and modernity, his focus on institutions of land and property means that those bigger questions are not made explicit: the word ‘capitalism’, for example, does not appear in the text. Ramseyer's view of the rise of modernity is broadly Weberian in its emphasis on ideas and institutions. Ramseyer rationalises colonialism through what 19th century jurists called the ‘Agricultural Argument’—the assertion that because natives were not really working the land, they could be dispossessed of legal claims to the lands they inhabited (cf. Graeber and Wengrow 2021: 149–150). Following William Blackstone, writing in 1765, he defines ownership as the ‘sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises … in total exclusion of the right of another individual in the universe’ (Ramseyer 2026: 172). Ramseyer appears to accept as natural the existence of social systems that employ coercion to provide benefits for certain individuals while making little investment in the common welfare. Colonialism is the premier example of such a social system: Ramseyer argues that colonial regimes were rational whereas the people who were colonised (especially if they were hunter-gatherers) were ‘irrational’ and unable to take advantage of the ‘opportunities’ presented. Ramseyer's panegyric to capital and colonialism proceeds through various rhetorical devices rather than historical analysis. The conceit that Europeans are uniquely rational in world history is, of course, a classic Eurocentric trope (Blaut 2000). Ramseyer (2026) attempts to extend this trope to Meiji Japan but his claims distort standard historical understandings of that period. Ramseyer does not deny that Ainu are native to Hokkaido; in fact, that premise is key to his narrative. But he claims—against all evidence—that the Ainu ‘disappeared’ after Japanese colonisation. Our analysis rejects Ramseyer's argument that the Ainu, like other colonised peoples, are responsible for the conditions under which their colonial and post-colonial histories developed.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1889368/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Paul Roscoe, University of Maine, United States

Reviewed by: Merve Gümrükçü Uslu, Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Türkiye

Christophe Darmangeat, Université Paris Cité, France

John Hennessey, Örebro University, Sweden

Footnotes

¹An earlier version of Ramseyer’s text appeared as a Harvard Law School Discussion Paper (Ramseyer 2025). Ramseyer (2026) was published in the Independent Law Journal, which subjects submissions to ‘peer approval’ but not peer review.

²Manning’s interview fails to ask the obvious question of where the Ainu are supposed to have originated.

³This conclusion is supported by an extensive literature and has received further confirmation from recent genetic and linguistic research. For a review, see Hudson (2022a). Ironically, assertions that the Ainu are not native to the Japanese archipelago conflict with nationalist writings from the 1980s which proposed that, because the Ainu were descended from the Jōmon, they are ‘more Japanese than the Japanese’ (Umehara 1994; cf. Hudson 2007; Hudson and Zancan 2025).

⁴The fact that North Sentinel islanders repel anyone who attempts to land does not necessarily mean they are violent within their own society. Ramseyer (2026: 170) informs us that the other Andaman Islands ‘had the good fortune to be colonized by the British’, a claim that bears little relationship to historical reality (cf. Sen 2010) and the islanders fared no better under a brutal Japanese occupation from 1942-1945.

⁵The relevant citation is on p. 742 of Pinker (2011), not p. 614 as quoted by Ramseyer.

⁶The name Yanomami has variant spellings, with different usages sometimes reflecting acceptance or critique of Chagnon’s views.

⁷Ramseyer accepts that some scholars have suggested 40,000 BP, citing Hanihara and Ishida (2009), which is incorrectly listed as 2019. However, he insists that ‘the matter is unclear’. What is unclear is the status of lithic assemblages dating before 40,000 BP (Satō 2025).

⁸The Americas were, of course, home to much larger European colonial populations than those found in Asia with, for example, over a million Europeans moving to North America and the British West Indies between 1689 and 1815 (Horn 1998: 50).

⁹Despite the gendered language, women played an important role in market production and exchange in many societies.

¹⁰A footnote to this statement cites Bettinger et al. (2007), a paper which makes no mention of farmers ‘keeping their word’, as well as Wade’s controversial book A Troublesome Inheritance, which suggests that social trust has, in part, a genetic basis (Wade 2014: 50-53).

¹¹The text of this treaty is available through the Edwin Ginn Library, Tufts University (https://web.archive.org/web/20080509122905/http:/fletcher.tufts.edu/multi/sealtreaty.html#IV).

¹²The caption to Ramseyer’s Table 1 contains a small but telling example of the lengths he goes to reject the notion that Ainu formed a separate ethnic identity. He translates kyū-dojin—incorrectly romanised as donin—as ‘former local people’, whereas the standard translation ‘Former Aborigines’ derives from the 1899 ‘Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act’.