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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
In 1406, the first fleet found two Chinese colonial towns in east Java where a thousand households of Cantonese and Fukienese migrants had settled. Elsewhere his fleets brokered peace amongst contending Chinese traders, and some of their crew stayed behind in southeast Asia with the hope of becoming Chinese traders and middlemen between Chinese ports and local southeast Asian traders and producers. Also, after 1457 some Chinese merchants were legally permitted to work abroad and thereby gain permission to trade between their homeland and their new place of settlement. An important instance of this type of arrangement was their settlement in the Ryukyus Islands. From his unification of the Ryukyus in 1429, King Sho Hashi actively developed trade between his country and the rest of East Asia. Crucial to his strategy was his reliance on Fukienese merchants. Not only did he invite them to live near his capital in Okinawa and carry out trade between the Ryukyus and China and Japan, but also he relied on them to carry out a highly profitable series of trading tribute missions to China. From 1429 to 1540, he and his successors sent 171 missions to China, whereby these Chinese merchants acquired Chinese goods which they proceeded to sell throughout East Asia. From 1429 to 1609, Ryukyu ships sailed to Siam 58 times, to Melaka 20 times, to Patani nine times, to Sumtra twice. The Ryukyus, in Anthony Reid's words, "became a crucial link between Southeast and Northeast Asia when direct trade was most inhibited." Serious research on the rich Okinawan archives about this trade has only recently begun, and but when I finished I believe we can expect to have a far greater idea of how Chinese foreign trade was actually conducted.

Finally, there is the history of the Wako. The activities of these pirates shows the continued links between maritime trade and warfare even after the Ming ban. These pirate raids had begun in the northeast Asia during the early fourteenth century. The Yuan dynasty was preoccupied with dividing the vast Mongol empire into four independent Kahnates, Korea suffered a breakdown of its land and military systems, and the Japanese bakufu was encountering greater trouble controlling those western stretches of the country that had begun to thrive from oceanic commerce. Two groups of pirates arose. The first consisted of small bands of poor landless residents of the Korean and Northern Chinese coast and of the small islands between Kyushu and Korea. These bands attacked coastal villages of the Korean Peninsula and sometimes the Liaodong and Shandong peninsulas to procure food and cloth for subsistence living as well as to capture human beings for the regional slave trade. The big bands were composed of large fleets of well-organized, well-trained, and well-financed pirates sent forth by daimyos and merchants in western Japan to import Chinese coin, deal in captured slaves, and raid coastal villages. Their raiding soon drove the Mongol and Korean governments to stop trade with Japan, thereby only adding fuel to the flames of their piracy.

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