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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
Like the Japanese and Koreans, Chinese have understandably had little trouble believing that the industrial revolution in the West brought to a close the political, cultural, and economic worlds of East Asia I have been discussing over the past five weeks. In short, the nineteenth century saw a great discontinuity in East Asia, as maritime trade was transformed from the tribute to the treaty-port system.

     Nineteenth century Westerners generally viewed these changes favorably. They saw them as the inevitable advance of free trade and civilization, blocked by obdurate and corrupt ruling classes. If their successors in the twentieth century West have tended to share more the usual East Asian view of these events as aggressive and imperialistic, they, like scholars elsewhere, have commonly assumed that this Western intrusion brought fundamental changes to the structure, operation, and control of maritime East Asia. Of course, some Western scholars have long wondered how widely used were these coastal innovations, particularly inland. Chinese may have begun in the 1880s to use small steam engine tugs to haul river junks and barges in tow along their smaller rivers, and so give new life to the traditional river traffic, as any visitor to contemporary China will recognize. But the traditional framework of understanding nineteenth and early twentieth century China, as the West and East Asia, the West and China, or the West and Japan, remained in place.

     In the past decade and a half, however, this framework has come under sharp attack from several young Japanese scholars, such as my former colleague Hamashita Takeshi of the University of Tokyo, Sugihara Kaoru of SOAS, and Kagotani Naoto of Kyoto University. Since my own research on the very complex, global dimensions of East Asian maritime trade at this time has been limited, I would like to focus today on what their findings tell us about two issues in the maritime history of East Asia from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s. While their work, I believe, is weakened by an emphasis on transport and consumption over production and by a still unclear picture of the domestic Chinese economy, it nonetheless has forced us to re-examine some major issues from a wider, probably more accurate perspective.

     Fist, in asking whose trade benefited from the arrival of the West, these scholars and the increasing number of their students have not concentrated solely on the West. They have argued that in this heyday of Western imperialism and treaty ports the intra-Asian trade by the early twentieth century accounted for more, in value and volume, than the Western trade with Asia, including East Asia.

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