Also, as of 1912, 69% of Japan's exports to the West were raw materials for processing, while 66% of its imports from these two parts of the world were manufactured goods. Meanwhile, India's corresponding figures for its trade with Britain were 92% and 77%. Yet, any sense that these economies were functioning, like Africa and Latin America, as colonial resource feeders to imperial manufacturing countries, is weakened by comparing other statistics on Asian exports and imports. In 1913, Asian exports to the West were valued at 214,110,000 pounds and imports from there were 221,950,000 pounds. At the same time, intra-Asian trade had risen remarkably. It was valued at 30,520,000 pounds in 1883, 51,910,000 pounds in 1898, and 148,990,000 pounds in 1913. In other words, during these three decades, intra-Asian trade achieved a remarkable 5.4% annual growth rate, much greater than the growth rate for Asian trade in general. Thus, Asian nations, and particularly those in East Asia, did not fall into the kind of dependent or enclave economy which befell Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the globe out of their contact with the West. Instead, their sphere of trade broadened, so that northeast and southeast Asia were linked by trade with south Asia to a degree previously considered impossible.

     To see how this intra-Asian trade was structured and now it flourished, we can hardly do better than look at the trading of two commodities widely produced and sold in this intra-Asian trading system. The first is opium, supposedly the main commodity responsible for the ending of the tribute system and the introduction of Western economic power over China. It is too often forgotten that all the opium shipped by the British to China came from another Asian country, India, as only through the use of this Asian product were British shippers able to reverse the long-standing British, not Indian trade deficit with China. In the early nineteenth century, this product was increasingly transported to China on the boats of British country traders who acquired their profits from intra-Asian trade. The British East India Company, which held a state-approved monopoly on the British-China trade, saw its role in this trade decline considerably, so that the company itself was disbanded in 1832 while the country traders went on to found their Asian empires. the sole British trading agency with China. (*)

     In 1883, opium accounted for close to 80% of the exports from India to China. Its contribution to China's industrialization was economically at best limited and socially destructive; in India it involved peasants in its cultivation and brought in taxes to the government, but overall it had a limited link to the modern economic development of India.