By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tosa had entered an acute period of hardship. Hikotarō's bleak appraisal of the Tosa economy at the middle of the eighteenth century linked together many strands of a complex story of developing crisis. He could have added to his list the wreck that domain finances had become, and the frequent occurrence of famine and flooding that plagued the domain. The interactions of population growth, agricultural development, deforestation, and rising taxation had produced sad conditions in Tosa by the eighteenth century. Tosa's economy had grown rapidly in the early and middle part of the seventeenth century, and this was brought about by the economy of service to the Tokugawa in which most taxes were spent by the lord outside of the domain for alternate attendance or other duty and which made the private economy of Tosa heavily dependent upon an Osaka-controlled market. The growth had been rapid, but by the eighteenth century, these same relationships had contributed to creating the problems lamented by Hikotarō and a world in which there was a widespread loss of respect for the rulers.