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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
     Contrast such keen maritime activity with the far narrower horizons imposed soon afterwards by the Tokugawa government. From 1635 up to 1868, it prevented all Japanese from going abroad, from practicing foreign trade outside the confines of the small island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay, and from doing this trade with foreign merchants other than those it officially registered from just two nations, China and the Netherlands. Moreover, it imposed trade quotas limiting both exports and imports, so as to retain tight shogunal control over this determined by the Tokugawa government.

     In China, the new Qing dynasty also established a policy to exclude privately conducted foreign trade. In 1655, it issued its first ban on overseas voyages by Chinese, and in the following year it decreed capital punishment for all Chinese who privately engaged in foreign trade. These harsh restrictions on the conduct of private overseas trade by Chinese outside the tribute system were prompted by the continuing threat posed to Qing rule by the coastal forces of Zheng Chenggong. Sympathetic to the fallen Ming dynasty, this pirate-rebel had requested military aid for the Ming's restoration from nearly 20 rulers throughout the world. Some of these rulers were as close as the bakufu in Japan, and others as far away as the Pope in Rome. To remove this maritime threat and then to suppress the land-based insurrection by the three feudatory governor-generals of southeast and southwest China in 1664, the Qing government forced all coastal residents from the mouth of the Yangtze River down to the Canton delta to move between 10 to 15 miles inland. By depriving the pirates of their grain supplies, secret bases, and profits from smuggling, it succeeded in greatly curtailing Chinese private overseas trade to a degree that would have amazed any Ming government official. Whereas the average number of Chinese mainland ships arriving at Nagasaki had been 39 from 1650 to 1662, that number dropped greatly to a mere 7 between 1663 and 1684 during the years of the official ban. With no Japanese or Portuguese rivals and so great a drop in the number of Chinese competitors, it is no wonder that the Dutch are thought to have dominated the Japanese export trade in the late seventeenth century.

     It is only when we look carefully at the Japanese and Chinese records that another, far more complex story emerges. This new analysis, which derives from a considerable amount of highly detailed work done in Japan over the past two decades, counters the traditional account in two ways. First, it downplays the supposed dampening of the Japanese export trade by the so-called policy of national seclusion and sees this period, particularly from the 1660s, as one when Japan's economy was restructured rather than cut off from the rest of the world.

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