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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
In contrast, in northeast Asia Tokugawa Japan barred the emigration of its people and restricted its exports and imports as part of a policy of import substitution. This stance eventually led to a great decline in its financial , shipping, and trading ties with other East Asian and southeast Asian countries over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

     The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been viewed as a break in this structure of East Asian maritime trade. In both East Asia and the West, this period has been viewed as the heyday of Western imperialism and the consequent decline of Chinese dominance in East Asia. Beginning with the Opium War along the Chinese coast, British and American traders, missionaries and gunboats forcibly brought an end to the tribute system of China by opening up treaty ports in China, Japan, and Korea to Western trade. From just the sole port of Canton in China, of Nagasaki in Japan, and of none in Korea, the number of treaty ports legally open to foreign trade by the 1890s stood at 14 in China, all in Japan, and 3 in Korea.

     Likewise, at all these treaty ports, Westerners introduced many trading and financial innovations. In the 1860s, steamships first brought their heavy cargoes from Europe to China, cutting the time of travel considerably. 4,500 miles were also saved by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868, so that by 1882 steamships could make the Europe-China run in a quarter of the time they had needed at mid-century. The trip from Canton to Tianjin was reduced to less than a week. More important, these steamships freed China coast boats from the monsoon calendar, as merchants could regularly travel back and forth regardless of the winds. Shipment costs accordingly fell, and the coastal trade of East Asia flourished as never before.

     The cost of these changes in Chinese eyes, however, was considerable. As they saw their political world collapse into turmoil, their traditional values threatened by political parties intent on revolution, and their country invaded repeatedly by first the West and then Japan, many of them have come to regard their modern history as a series of unending tragedies inflicted from abroad. Thus, the end of Chinese political dominance over the East Asian world order has been widely understood as the end of Chinese dominance of the mercantile world we have been studying. What was a Chinese junk compared to a British steamer, a Chinese pawnbroker to the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, and a Chinese loom to the Western power looms in Lancashire or, by the century's end, in Shanghai?

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