The petitions of the petition box are a rare window into the political and economic thought of many types of people in Tosa. These petitions reveal that merchants and not samurai were the primary force behind the spread and development of kokueki thought, and that kokueki thought emerged earlier than previously has been thought. A second agenda of this chapter is to argue that kokueki was gradually adopted by the samurai rulers because it allowed them to justify limiting their devotion to the “economy of service,” articulate reasons for supporting commercial enterprise, and thereby strengthen the foundation of their rule in the face of the changes and crisis that the economy of service engendered. My purpose in this and the next chapter is to reveal the diverse class interests that led to the origins and spread of kokueki thought, and to link these to the specific historical context of the mid-eighteenth-century domainal crisis as defined in the previous chapters.