Page 2

The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
I would like today to suggest otherwise. By drawing upon lectures, I have had the good fortune to present at Cambridge in April and May, I want to urge the need for historians of East Asia to look away from land-based political centers to coastal economic areas and so discover the role of maritime connections in forging an East Asian coastal economy. Long before the arrival of the Europeans, the waters of the western Pacific were being crisscrossed by Asian and Arab vessels engaged in the creation of highly developed trading systems. Access to water was crucial for the prosperity of six or seven Chinese provinces, virtually all of the Japanese domains, and much of the Korean peninsula. This maritime economy also was important for linking the world's three major population centers, Western Europe, China and India. In this Asian trade European merchants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequented Asian ports not to sell European products but to ship Asian products among Asian markets and then bring them back to eager European markets. And even afterwards, they repeatedly confessed to great difficulty penetrating the highly developed East Asian markets.

My topic today, a survey of the problems of East Asian currency from the tenth to the early seventeenth century, may seem at odds with this international theme, since currency has typically been viewed as a measure of the integration of a nation's market economy. Yet, a nation's currency is not just a means of exchange. It also is the object of exchanges, particularly when it consists of precious metals like copper and silver and is used in international transactions. Consequently, the history of currency can make use of two concepts central to the history of interstate relations: direct interconnections and horizontal continuities. Introduced by the late Joseph Fletcher for his study of the Afro-Eurasian world, these concepts serve equally well for a discussion of Chinese and Japanese currencies. Direct interconnections denotes historical phenomena, such as trade or war, linking two or more societies, while the second indicates parallel economic or social phenomena experienced contemporaneously, but not causally, by two or more societies. Thus, only from the mid-twelfth century can we speak of significant interconnections between Chinese and Japanese currencies. If in these early interconnections Japan was the decidedly inferior partner, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that would change. Our tale then is how and why Japan finally broke free of the dominance and problems of China's currency and so established the first self-sufficient, independent alternative to a Chinese currency system in East Asia. Paradoxically, this period also saw the formation of closer Chinese, Japanese, and European economic ties, thus developing the structure for a flourishing East Asian maritime economy.

1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|Next