Growth Recurring
Historically, mass poverty is the normal human condition. This has naturally led to attempt to explain those historically rare instances of sustained economic growth leading to mass prosperity as being somehow special. Not merely in being, before 1900, rare but also involving some very particular human motivations, institutions or discoveries. A
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More property rights, legal systems, physical infrastructure.
reducing population pressure on the land (hence leading to the abolishment of serfdom)
That has the economics of servitude the wrong way around. For servitude to be economically rational, subsistence + enforcement costs have to be higher than free wages. As population mounts, wages fall, encouraging the abolition of serfdom. Slavery and serfdom are features of low population to land ratios.
It was the barriers to landlord collusion which allowed wages to rise after the Black Death, encouraging marketisation of tenancies and capital investment. In Eastern Europe, conversely, one gets re-enserfment as rulers accept their service nobilities' pleas to tie peasants to the land, since said nobility was militarily crucial to ruler forces.
how those particular principalities hit upon ...
That is covered more in his The European Miracle. Though Growth Recurring does cover Japan in more detail. The Tokugawa bakufu created a big Edo market, required periodic daimyo attendance, also encouraging marketisation, but otherwise largely left the daimyo free to run their own han, which encouraged them to seek higher revenues through commercialisation.
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