Page 12

The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
Japan's relatively small size and rich supplies of these metals doubtless helped it gain this independence, satisfy its own needs, and ultimately achieve nationwide integration of its rice market. Put in such bald terms, this development can seem happy and easy, inevitable and nationalistic. But it was actually quite different. It took Japan many centuries to mine productively and sufficiently its rich resources of gold, silver, and copper. Once achieved, however, this currency independence did not translate into commercial dominance. In fact, in some paradoxical ways, this currency independence only tightened the links between East Asian economies under the conditions of continued Chinese and Portuguese dominance of the maritime trade in East Asia. Consequently, mercantilist concerns soon won out over the attractions of increased foreign trade with China, Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and Southeast Asian countries. Alarmed at the flow abroad of its gold, silver, and copper currency and by its dependence on products made elsewhere in East Asia, the Tokugawa shogunate promulgated between 1635 and 1639 some well-known orders aimed at reducing Japanese contacts abroad. It prohibited all Japanese from going abroad and eventually from returning from abroad. It persecuted Christianity, it expelled all Portuguese and metzos, and it limited Japanese foreign trade to the port of Nagasaki, where only Dutch and Chinese merchants were permitted to trade.

To call this "seclusion policy" "isolationist" is an exaggeration and even a misunderstanding. It still allowed two other foreign contacts, with Korea through Lord So of the island of Tsushima between Japan and Korea, and allowed "tributary missions" to China from the king of the Ryukyu Islands, subjugated in 1609 and thereafter closely controlled by the daimyo of Satsuma in southern Japan. In sum, during the Tokugawa period, Japan maintained regular and direct diplomacy and trading relations with Korea and the Dutch, and trading with China. The Ryukyu Islands, while retaining diplomatic relations with Japan, also was able to play the role of a key intermediary between China and Japan by its conducting, unlike Japan, tribute trade with China. Thus, through all these routes Japan exported silver to China at ever higher levels up to the 1660s, and between 1660 and 1715 even traded its raw copper with Chinese ships explicitly sent by the Chinese state. The governments of Japan and China, so ready to use the Legalistic-Confucian rhetoric of state control that originated in land-locked north China, were worried that their currencies were intermeshed in ways neither government wanted. But, as I will show next week in my discussion of their trade and bullion, such concerns found it difficult to navigate in the complex waters of the two increasingly commercialized coastal economies of these nations now interconnected by boat and silver. And so, the needs of their national currencies forged the currency and commercial interconnections that lay the basis for the broader early modern economy East Asia.

Previous |7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|Next