Edo was a small fishing village with a dilapidated castle nearby when in 1590 it was given to Tokugawa Ieyasu to be the center of his domain. Ieyasu developed a grand castle and town which by 1750 had a population of as many as one million people. It became the central political city and, being so large, an important economic center too. By the end of the Edo period in 1868, the city had grown so dominant that the new government of the Meiji restorers retained the city as their capital, renaming it Tokyo or ‘Eastern Capital’ in deference to the former capital at Kyoto.
