1 China

1.1 The Order of Tianxia and the Rise of the Qing Dynasty

Concerning East Asian international relations in the pre-modern era, the order of tianxia, centered around Chinese civilization, held great importance. The Chinese civilization born along the central area of the Huang He (Yellow River) over three thousand years ago spread via Chinese who claimed superiority over the surrounding yi peoples (barbarians) and even felt it was desirable to eventually assimilate them into Chinese civilization. Additionally, Confucianism was taught by Confucius around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and the Chinese believed spreading a moral order of li, focusing on adherence to hierarchical relationships, was also linked to the stabilization of tianxia.

Therein, in addition to adopting the idea that the emperor overseeing Chinese civilization and tianxia should be an individual of high moral character who adheres to the tenants of Confucianism and brings stability, a bureaucratic system developed based on imperial examinations in which hiring decisions were determined though the testing of individuals versed in Confucianism. And externally extending various benefits to foreign rulers in exchange for those rulers attaching themselves to and following the virtue of the emperor is thought to have engendered a hierarchical relationship between the emperor and foreign rulers, cementing a sense of unification and identification with the tianxia. This was a tributary relationship.

While it is true that trade (at hu-shi border trade markets) was also conducted with countries and regions without an official tributary relationship based on conditions established by the emperor’s rule, this too was seen as an extension of the tianxia. Furthermore, tribute nations were given preferable treatment in trade, and under the idea that it was desirable to restrict trade by private citizens in order to weaken opposing forces, the “Hai-jin sea ban” policy of frequently eliminating private merchants was enforced.

The Ming order based on these sorts of principles was inherited by the Qing, which grew in power centering around the Jurchen people of Northeast Asia. The Jurchen people had originally traded with the Ming at Liaodong hu-shi border trade markets. However, the Ming began to wane due to a miliary dispatch to Korea by Japan’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi, conflict within the imperial court, and clamped down trade conditions. As a result, the Jurchen leader Nurhaci, who unified the Jurchen tribes, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the Ming. In 1616, he established the Later Jin Khanate and began to oppose the Ming. Then, the Later Jin Khanate grew stronger, establishing the “Eight Banners” military organization filled with Jurchen people, as well as Mongolians and Ming soldiers who had surrendered to Jurchen forces. Eventually, the Jurchen people took the name Manchu, and in 1636 changed the name of their state to Qing.

In 1644, the Ming crumbled in Li Zicheng’s rebellion. To quell the chaos, Ming military leader Wu Sangui opened the Shanhaiguan Gate of the Great Wall and let the Qing forces inside. The Qing, which had relocated its capital to Beijing, mostly inherited the general control framework of the Ming from the “Eighteen Provinces of China.” In the process of subjugating the holdover remnants of the Ming Dynasty, the Qing initially strengthened the Haijin sea ban, but relaxed it after overthrowing The Kingdom of Tungning (the Zheng Dynasty ruled Taiwan) in 1683. This helped pave the way to economic prosperity in the eighteenth century.

Amidst these sorts of developments, most Asian countries came to pay tribute to the Qing. From the standpoint of respecting Confucianism, Korea yearned for the Ming Dynasty of the Han people that exemplified “Chinese” values. Therein, they took a cold stance towards the rise of the Later Jin Khanate and Qing, which to them represented northern yi barbarians. As a result, Korean King Injo of Joseon was besieged by Qing forces, and forced into paying tribute to the Qing in 1637. After the dissolving of the Ming, Korea deepened its resolve to inherit and sustain the Chinese civilization and practice the purest version of Confucian values. Thus, they attempted to achieve a high position within the Qing’s tianxia by continuing to pay a reluctant tribute to the Qing.Footnote 1

The Ming positioned Ryukyu as being responsible for ensuring maritime region stability, and as such, Ryukyu prospered through tribute trade profits. In 1609, the Satsuma Domain of Japan invaded Ryukyu with an eye on those profits, and subsequently Ryukyu became subordinate to both Japan and the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Thus, from the viewpoint of Beijing, the feeling of loyalty expressed by Ryukyu’s tributes did come into question, but the Ming and Qing chose to give quiet consent to avoid a clash with Japan.

Though the various dynasties in what is currently called Southeast Asia respected the rationales of doctrines such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam and had absolutely no reason to attach themselves to Chinese civilization, they paid tribute based on the motivation of economic profit. In part as an effort to oppose the southern advancement of the large dynasties of the Ming and Qing to the north, the dynasties that emerged in what is now Vietnam absorbed Confucianism and Chinese characters and proclaimed superiority over surrounding countries as a centralized state.

Regarding the relationship between the Ming and Japan, due to the Wokou pirate groups, which consisted mainly of Japanese people, and the invasions of Korea by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century, relations were generally not smooth. In the fourteenth century, to actualize Wokou countermeasures and profit through trade, the Ming and Japan’s Ashikaga clan established a tributary relationship. But this did not last long. The Japanese Tokugawa regime conquered the Toyotomi clan. And, to guard against the influx of Christianity from the mid-seventeenth century onward, right around the transition from the Ming to Qing Dynasty, the regime prohibited Japanese people from travelling abroad by ship and restricted docking for Qing ships to Nagasaki only. Therein, the relationship between the Qing and Japan did not exceed an extremely limited extent until entering into the Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty in 1871. However, Japan did strive to gather foreign information written in Chinese through Nagasaki, and this also helped pave the way to opening the Japanese borders in the mid-nineteenth century.

1.2 Power Games in Inner Asia

In the process of expansion, the Qing placed an extremely high value on strengthening relationships with Mongolian tribes who possessed powerful horseback military strength. Furthermore, influence of the Gelug school (a.k.a. the Yellow Hat school), a reformist branch of Tibetan Buddhism, spread rapidly throughout Northeast Asian nomads on horseback, including the Mongolian tribes from the late sixteenth century onward. Therein, the history of Inner Asia centering around Tibetan Buddhism unfolded as another important aspect of Qing history.

Tibetan Buddhism belongs to the Mahayana Buddhism lineage. However, in the process of its development, various religious sects and powerful families formed ties, sparking power struggles. Founded by the fourteenth to fifteenth century monk Je Tsongkhapa, the Gelug school strengthened its missionary activity in Mongolia to bolster its own survival. Notably, the sixteenth century Mongolian grasslands ruler Altan Khan converted to the Gelug school, and the school solidified unshakeable influence in Inner Asia. Furthermore, the Gelug school leader was designated with the title “Dalai Lama” by Altan Khan.

Subsequently, the belief spread among the nomads of Inner Asia that the Khan leader unifying the military groups was an ideal choice as the benefactor who could provide better protection for the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. Therein, the Later Jin Khanate and Qing tried to position itself as the protector of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. However, the Mongolian tribe Dzungar, which rose to prominence centered around the northern area of today’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, also attempted to exert that same exact claim to be the protector of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism and tried to strengthen its influence in Mongolia and Tibet. As a result, the national interests of the Qing and Dzungar directly clashed. And in addition to the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing leading forces into Mongolia in 1720 towards the end of the Kangxi period, the Qing placed Tibet completely under Qing influence. Then, in the 1750s, the Qianlong Emperor completely overthrew Dzungar, dubbed the area “Xinjiang,” and integrated it into Qing control.

Regarding Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, in which Chinese and Confucianism did not circulate, and which conducted their own society and culture based on their own individual philosophies, the Qing installed Lifan Yuan, Office for Relations with Principalities, and ruled them indirectly. Specifically, the Qing bequeathed territory to the Mongolian Khans and nobles, sent imperial commissioner-residents to the Dalai Lama government in Tibet as representatives of the emperor,Footnote 2 and entrusted the rule of Xinjiang to local elites under the Generals of Ili.

On the whole, these arrangements established relationships based on the rationales between the emperor and each region, and there was no leeway for the Qing to introduce an “Eighteen Provinces of China” administration regimen involving imperial exam certified bureaucrats. As a result, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang followed the Manchu emperor, but did not feel any special sense of belonging to China or Chinese civilization. The Qing Dynasty was basically a compound empire of multiple civilizations and multiple cultures, and it functioned based on the central Manchu emperor and nobles belonging to the Eight Banners applying different ruling rationales as appropriate for each situation. Entering the modern era in which Chinese nationalism arose, these relationships would falter and face ruin, and tension would continue to exist between the regime that inherited the Qing domain and focused on strengthening the sense of being “Chinese people” and the “minority peoples” that valued the rationales of their own cultures.Footnote 3

1.3 East and West Interaction in the Qing Dynasty

Looking at the Qing from the viewpoint of inheriting Chinese civilization, it is true that in the early Qing Dynasty, as a symbol of obedience, customary Manchu qipao garments and the queue hairstyle were enforced, and even later on, acts repudiating rule by Manchu people and decrying the existence of yi (barbarians) were strictly punished. So, one must admit that there definitely were some major contradictions to that viewpoint. However, the Qing did not refute Confucianism or Chinese culture itself. In fact, the Qing even went as far as taking the stance that it saved Chinese civilization from chaos and was responsible for bringing it to prosperity once more.Footnote 4 Furthermore, Confucianism suppressed free speech and strengthened its pragmatic leanings of professing the need for reform based on an acceptance of Qing rule.Footnote 5 The Qing era also saw the interaction between Eastern and Western civilizations that had existed from the Ming Dynasty onwards through missionaries. The inheritance of this remains mainly in the calendar system and art.

However, until the eighteenth century interactions between Eastern and Western civilizations was, nevertheless, regulated by the Qing and was subjected to restrictions. Most notable is the case in which the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) chose to allow both Christian faith and ancestor worship side-by-side to bolster missionary activity, and the Pope declared that this decision made by the Society of Jesus was heresy. In the “Eighteen Provinces of China” administration, the Yongzheng Emperor who valued Confucian li vehemently rejected this, and Christian missionary activity was finally banned. Subsequently, missionary activities were limited to the transmission of arts and technology, and only at the level of the Beijing court.

And regarding trade, though private Western ships were allowed only as far as Guangdong and trade was conducted through the mediation of local licensed merchants (Guangdong Thirteen merchants) from 1757 of the Qianlong period onward, Great Britain valued free trade and bristled against that kind of regulated trade.Footnote 6 In 1793, the Macartney Embassy petitioned the Qianlong Emperor to allow free trade. However, citing the tianxia ideal and China as a “vast territory with abundant resources,” the Qianlong Emperor did not recognize the need for actively pursuing trade with the West. The dissatisfaction felt by Great Britain would become one factor for the subsequent First Opium War.

And with these stances in play, the Qing’s lack of motivation to pursue an open relationship with the West amidst an Asia permeated with a rapidly growing Western influence from the nineteenth century onward resulted in the Qing being left behind in terms of response. Moreover, defeats during the First Opium War and the Arrow War (Second Opium War) were factors leading to the Qing, and modern China, taking a subservient role within the international order headed by the West.

2 India and the Land and Sea Networks Surrounding It

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, India had entered a period of new changes. However, Vasco da Gama was not the one who opened the door to these changes. Rather, changes that had been occurring in Iran and Central Asia since the latter half of the fifteenth century were spreading to India through land and sea transportation networks.

In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the rise and fall of the Turkoman tribal confederations of the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu in Iran, followed by the emergence of the Safavids along with the collapse of the Timurids and the emergence of the Uzbeks in Central Asia, pushed many Turkic peoples to the new land of India. In the late fifteenth century, the Turks who came from the Persian Gulf to South India via the Indian Ocean became an important force in the cavalry corps of the Muslim Bahmanids as well as the Hindu Vijayanagar Kingdom. After the collapse of the Bahmanids at the end of the fifteenth century, these Turkic soldiers established dynastic powers such as the Adil Shahis, the Qutb Shahis, and the Barid Shahis. In the meantime, the Mughal Empire was founded in northern India by Babur, a prince of the Timurids, who was one of the Turkic peoples who came to India after being forced to leave Central Asia.

Thus, the movement of people originating in Iran and Central Asia, and the accompanying changes in economic and social structure, reached India from both sea and land by the early sixteenth century. It was not only the Turks who came from Iran to India. Mahmud Gawan, the vizier of the Bahmanids, and Mir Jumla, who took control of the Qutb Shahis and later moved to the Mughal Empire, had migrated as merchants, and their backgrounds were multifaceted. The former was also a man of letters with a deep knowledge of Persian literature. In addition, people from East Africa played remarkable roles as soldiers. Malik Anbar, the vizier of the Nizam Shahis in the Deccan, was the most prominent figure. The East African soldiers also established an independent government in Bengal at the end of the fifteenth century. There is also a record showing that the founder of the Husayn Shahis, which overthrew this independent government, was the commander of the Arab legions that had migrated to this region.

The Portuguese, who arrived in the midst of these changes, found these Turks to be the soldiers of the local states in the coastal areas of India. The Portuguese quickly realized that warhorses, the weapons of war of the Turks, were being shipped from ports in the Persian Gulf to India, and that the warhorse trade was a much more lucrative business than the trade for pepper and other commodities. The warhorses were sold in exchange for gold, and the ships returning to the Persian Gulf were mainly loaded with rice from South India. However, this excess of imports over exports was quite exceptional in the context of the foreign trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Tomé Pires, a Portuguese man who traveled through the waters around Asia, called the region of Gujarat on the northwestern coast of India by the name of its representative port city, Khambaya (Eng. Cambay), and wrote, “Cambay chiefly stretches out two arms, with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden and with the other towards Malacca” (Pires 1944, vol. 1, p. 42). These words cleverly capture the characteristics of the Indian subcontinent, which is located between the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia in the trade network of the Indian Ocean. The port cities of India connected to this trade network included Khambaya, Surat, Daman, and Diu in Gujarat; Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, etc. in Konkan on the northern part of the Indian west coast; Honnavar, Bhatkal, Mangalor, etc. in Kanara on the central part; Kannur (Eng. Cannanore), Kozhikode (Eng. Calicut), Kochi (Eng. Cochin), Kollam (Eng. Quilon), etc. in Malabar on the southern part; Colombo, Galle, Trincomalee, etc. in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); Nagapattinam, Maylappur (Eng. Mylapore), Pazhaverkadu (Eng. Pulicat), Machilipatnam (Eng. Masulipatnam), etc. in the coastal region of Coromandel on the east coast of India; and Hugli, Chattogram (Eng. Chittagong), etc. in the Bengal of eastern India.

These Indian port cities not only maintained trade with each other, but also had overseas networks with other port cities in the Indian Ocean region. Their major trading partners were Hormuz and Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf coast; Aden on the Arabian Peninsula; Sofala, Mombasa, and Mogadishu on the east coast of Africa; and Malacca and Aceh in Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, Indian port cities were connected to the cities of Agra, Delhi, and Lahore in the interior of the Mughal Empire through land and river transportation routes. And the land transportation routes extended further into the adjacent regions of the Indian subcontinent. But the most important routes for foreign trade were those from Punjab in northwest India or Sind in west India to Central Asia or Iran via Kabul or Qandahar.

Among the agricultural products exported from India through these sea and land transportation routes were rice and pepper along with cinnamon from Ceylon, as well as processed products such as sugar and indigo. Teak from South India was exported as ship timber. The Portuguese were watchful over the shipping of teak, which could be used by their potential enemy, the Ottoman navy, for building warships. Among marine products, there were pearls from the Gulf of Mannar in northwestern Ceylon and cowries from the Maldives. The silk yarn produced in Bengal was not only exported overseas, but also transferred to Gujarat and other parts of India for processing into products. As for mineral resources, these include saltpeter (a material for gunpowder) and gems such as diamonds, but gold and silver were not produced, and the country depended solely on imports, while copper production stagnated in the seventeenth century.

On the other hand, agricultural products imported into India included melons, apples, raisins, and various nuts from Central Asia; and camphor, musk, benzoin, sandalwood, clove, nutmeg, and other spices and fragrances from Southeast Asia; all of which were luxury goods. Coffee from the Arabian Peninsula was imported in the first half of the seventeenth century, and tea was brought in at the end of the same century, but it is not known how these products were consumed in India at that time. As for handicrafts, a limited number of silk fabrics, such as velvet and carpets, were imported from Central Asia and Iran, and silk yarn was also imported from the latter. More important than the above products were the aforementioned imported war horses from Central Asia and Iran, and a small number of Arab horses. The reason for this was that the Indian states continued to retain military power, mainly in the form of cavalry, despite the unsuitable climate for breeding and raising war horses.

Various merchant groups were responsible for trade. For example, there were the Hindu and Jain merchants of Gujarat, collectively known as the Baniyas; the merchants of the Khojas and Bohras, Ismaili Muslims in the same region; the Chetti (Chettiar), a Hindu merchant group of the Coromandel coast; the Chulia, native Muslim merchants of this same region; and the Marwari, a group of merchants from Rajasthan. These Indian merchants settled in various parts of Central and West Asia, where they engaged in commercial activities, while Muslim and Armenian merchants came to India from West Asia. The Portuguese, the Dutch East India Company, and the British East India Company were all newcomers in the trade network surrounding India.

In the foreign trade conducted via trade routes spanning land and sea, India was a major contributor with a surplus of exports, and its balance of payments was covered by extensive imports of gold and silver. This pattern seems to have been established before the arrival of silver in India from the New World in the late sixteenth century. From the second half of the fourteenth century onward, the volume of silver coinage issued in the interior of northern India declined under Delhi Sultanate rule, but there was no such shortage of silver in coastal areas such as Bengal and Gujarat. The silver rupee, which later became the key currency of the Mughal Empire, was originally introduced by the Surs, who ruled Bengal in the first half of the sixteenth century. There is a theory that the source of silver for this region is the area from northern Burma to Yunnan. Portuguese records from the beginning of the sixteenth century indicate that large quantities of silver larin (derived from the name of the Iranian city of Lar) were sent from the Persian Gulf region, and gold xerafin (a corruption of Ashrafi, named after the Mamluk Dynasty monarch Ashraf Barsbay of Egypt) from the Red Sea region to India.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the spread of the silver rupee and the systematization of cash payments of land taxes in the Mughal Empire greatly increased the demand for silver, but this was covered by the large amount of silver from the New World that flowed into India through various transportation routes by sea and land. Bernier, a Frenchman who visited the court of the Mughal Empire in the middle of the seventeenth century, wrote, “Hindoustan (India) … absorbing a large portion of the gold and silver of the world” (Bernier 1916, p. 204). As this suggests, India was one of the world’s biggest consumers of silver at the time, on a par with China.

The movement of people was not only accompanied by products, but also by the production of spiritual culture. For example, three of the Muslim dynasties in the Deccan embraced Shi‘ism due to the influence of people who came from Iran. In addition, the Nimatullahiya, a Sufi order which had been influential in Iran, established a large base in the Deccan because the head of the sect’s family moved to that region. In terms of the dispersion of religious sects across the Indian Ocean, the same is true of the Ismailis who came from Yemen and Iran, and who settled in India and survived as the Khojas and Bohras. On the other hand, the expansion of the Sufi order of Naqshbandiyya, which had been under the patronization of the Timurid Dynasty in Central Asia, was not unrelated to the establishment of its successor, the Mughal Empire. Thus, the movement of people by land and sea during this period had an impact on the development of Islamic culture in India. India, however, was not merely a unilateral recipient. The Mujaddidiya, which emerged under the Mughal Empire as a branch of the Naqshbandiyya, later returned to Central Asia and maintained their influence until modern times. As for Southeast Asia, Raniri, a Muslim scholar from Gujarat who was active in Aceh, is a remarkable example who gave significant influence on Islamic culture in the region. Islam was not the monopolizing religion over the Indian Ocean. The early modern Indian Ocean witnessed, along with European mercantile activities, newcomers in the form of Catholic missionaries such as the Jesuits, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians, which were followed by Protestant missionaries.

3 Early Modern Japan

3.1 Political Consolidation

At the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu won a decisive victory over his rivals, paving the way for his consolidation of national supremacy by ending decades-long warfare and bringing the entire country of Japan under the control of one single political authority. In 1603, he had the emperor in Kyoto confer on him the title of shogun and set up the bakufu government, or the Tokugawa shogunate, in Edo (present-day Tokyo). The political authority of the Tokugawa shogunate as the early modern state, however, was not absolute. Ideologically, the fact that Tokugawa Ieyasu needed the title Shogun from the emperor meant the ultimate source of legitimacy resided in the imperial house. Furthermore, the Tokugawa shogunate had to share power with over two hundred local daimyo lords who submitted to the shogunate but retained significant power as semi-independent domains (han in Japanese), including power over taxation in their domains. Nevertheless, by the 1630 s, Tokugawa Ieyasu and his successors had consolidated a combinative regime of bakufu and domains (called the bakuhan system) that would last for more than two centuries (Totman 1993).

To neutralize potential threats from former rival domains, Ieyasu dispossessed, reduced, or transferred their land holdings, sometime erasing the entire domain. The confiscated lands previously owned by these domains were given to Tokugawa collateral domains or hereditary vassals to elevate them to daimyo status. In 1615, Ieyasu attacked the Osaka Castle, the power base of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for whom Ieyasu earlier served as senior minister, and annihilated the Toyotomi family, clearing the final major obstacle for power consolidation. Ieyasu then issued a series of legal documents to regulate the daimyo, the imperial house, courtiers, and later, temples and shrines, laying down a legal basis for exercising the power of bakufu.

One major strategy of the Tokugawa shogunate in containing the power of the domains was the policy of sankin kōtai, or “alternative attendance,” instituted in the 1630 s. All the daimyo were required to reside in Edo every other year as a service to the bakufu while their wives and children had to reside there permanently, essentially as hostages. As a result, the daimyo were forced to establish two administrative offices, one in Edo and one in their home domain, between which they had to travel back and forth. This arrangement was costly and weakened the financial basis of the domains, especially those potentially dangerous domains which were located furthest away from Edo. Moreover, the daimyo were forced to support public works including castle and road construction. All these strategies contributed to the consolidation of the power of bakufu (Totman 1993).

With the daimyo under check, the Tokugawa bakufu built on Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s policy of warrior-farmer separation to implement a social hierarchy. It should be noted that the bakufu never divided society into the four groups of samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants (shi-nō-kō-shō). Major distinctions were rather between samurai, hyakushō (“commoners” including farmers and people working in fishing and forestry), chōnin (urban dwellers), monks, priests and doctors, and eta and hinin (outcasts). Specific duties and professional skills were associated with each category of status. The distinctions were not all hierarchical, although the difference between samurai and other statuses was emphasized and eta and hinin were considered subhuman. Social mobility was very limited, although by the second half of the early modern period change of status was no longer impossible or rare.

Another feature of Tokugawa society was surveillance. The purpose of monitoring the population was to prevent people from following Christian teachings. Ieyasu was initially tolerant of Christian missionaries for the profit from trade. After the establishment of the bakufu, however, the ideological threat posed by Christianity to the new regime came to be perceived as outweighing the economic benefit of missionaries. Ieyasu adopted a policy of prohibition, issuing bans in 1612, and again in 1614. After suppressing a tenacious Christian-led peasant uprising in Kyushu in 1637, the bakufu became determined to root out Christianity entirely. It implemented a method of detection called fumi-e, requiring those suspected of being Christians to trample on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. A system of registration at Buddhist temples was also instituted. All Japanese were required to register as parishioners at a local temple that bore the responsibility of securing nobody in the area was following the outlawed Christian teaching (Hur 2008; Vaporis 1995).

3.2 Managing Borders

The need to root out Christianity in Japan, according to traditional historiography, led to the Tokugawa bakufu’s shutdown of exchange and communication with the outside world in the 1630s, a policy known as “national seclusion” or sakoku. The bakufu banned Portuguese and Spanish ships from visiting Japan, due to their zeal in the Catholic mission, and restricted foreign trade to Dutch traders, who promised to not proselytize in Japan but were still confined to a small man-made island, Dejima, outside Nagasaki. Foreign books were not allowed into Japan. With Dejima acting as the only access to outside nations, Japanese seclusion enabled the bakufu to maintain peace for over two hundred years and helped foster a distinctive Japanese culture. However, it also resulted in an insular mentality that missed out on discovering the spirit of science and reason as the West was doing at the time. In the postwar period, this insular mentality, believed to have evolved into a xenophobic nationalism in the modern period, was used by major scholars such as Watsuji Tetsurō to explain Japan’s slide into war in the 1930s (Watsuji 1950).

The Sakoku theory is now discredited for only looking at interactions with Europeans. Rather than seclusion, historians today view the Tokugawa bakufu as strategically regulating cross-border flows of people, goods, and information (Toby 1984; Arano 2019). It did so by controlling, directly or indirectly, “four portals,” which functioned as regulated gateways for trade and information flow. The bakufu delegated the management of cross-border movement to the three “gateway daimyo” of Satsuma, Tsushima, and Matsumae, while directly administering Nagasaki through an appointed governor. While Nagasaki managed trade with Dutch and Qing China ships, the Satsuma Daimyo was in charge of trading and relations with the Ryukyu Kingdom, Tsushima with Korea, and Matsumae with the Ainu people. Nagasaki and the three daimyo performed the duties of overseeing relations with foreign entities as service owed to the shogun as its subordinates. As compensation, they were granted exclusive prerogatives in conducting foreign trade (Arano 2019).

The “four portals” played a critical role in collecting information from outside Japan. The bakufu required the Dutch traders to provide regular reports on the latest activities of the world. At Nagasaki, Japanese interpreters of Dutch learned astronomy, physics, and other sciences while mediating communication between Dutch and Japanese. They functioned as key carriers of western knowledge into Japan before the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, (r. 1716–1745) loosened the ban on foreign books and allowed import of books in Chinese. He also sponsored the translation of western books. As a result, Japanese access to western knowledge through Chinese and translated texts broadened, and by the early nineteenth century some Japanese had a well-rounded grasp of western astronomy, medical science, physics, languages, and culture, evidenced by the emergence of a new form of knowledge known as “Dutch learning,” so-called because the knowledge was obtained via Dutch traders.

3.3 Political Ideology and Cultural Fermentation

One curious feature of the bakuhan system in early modern Japan is that the bakufu never consciously developed a political ideology to legitimize its rule. Theoretically, the right to rule came from the emperor, even though the Tokugawa shogun was the de facto ruler and the emperor was no more than a figurehead. In other words, there was a mismatch between actual power and symbolic authority. There was no evidence that the bakufu made explicit attempts to close that gap even though it was aware of it. Similarly, the bakufu was never proactive in constructing a theory to justify the status-based social formation of the bakuhan system. Rather, it was the neo-Confucian scholars who supplied the ideology to justify the status-based social order.

The most well-known neo-Confucian scholar in the early Tokugawa period was Hayashi Razan (1583–1657). Hayashi studied the Zhu-xi school of neo-Confucianism of the Song Dynasty with the Buddhist monk-turned Confucian Fujiwara Seika and offered his learning to the bakufu as an intellectual rationalization for the status-oriented bakuhan system. Yet while the Tokugawa shogunate hired Hayashi for lecturing on neo-Confucian teaching and drafting official documents, the Zhu-xi school of neo-Confucianism was not officially adopted as the ideology of the bakufu until the late eighteenth century when Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–1829), the senior councilor of the bakufu, singled out the Zhu-xi school as its official teaching and banned all other learnings from its academy.

Neo-Confucianism never went unchallenged in Tokugawa Japan. Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai called into question Zhu-xi’s neo-Confucianism as deviating from the original teaching of Confucius. They went back to early texts to recover what they believed to be the original meaning. The mid-Tokugawa period neo-Confucian Yamazaki Ansai, on the other hand, sought to integrate the teaching of Zhu-xi with Shinto. This attempt at synthesis, however, came to be fiercely denounced by those who upheld the superiority of the mythological narratives of eighth-century Shinto texts where local deities, the kami, play a central role. By emphasizing the indigenous teaching of the kami, contrasted with the “foreign” neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, these scholars advocated the indigenous learning of kokugaku or “Learning of Our Land,” which in the early nineteenth century evolved into an emperor-revering nationalism (Zhong 2016; Burns 2003).

3.4 Commercialization and the Problem of Governance

The bakuhan system ushered in a period of unprecedented domestic peace that stimulated production, exchange, and commercialization. Farmers reclaimed new lands and were able to produce a variety of cash crops including cotton, silk, and rapeseed oil. The standard of living improved over time and the population increased. Communication and transportation developed, partly the result of increased mobility enabled by the sankin kōtai system. As production and exchange increased, wholesalers and financiers emerged leading to further commercialization.

Urban centers grew across the country, partly because the bakufu allowed only one castle for each domain, giving rise to the formation of castle towns where merchants and craftsmen clustered to provide services to the growing urban population. Purely commercial towns and post towns that lined major highways also burgeoned. Edo in the eighteenth century had a population of more than one million and was one of the largest cities in the world (Totman 1993, pp. 146–159).

Commercialization, however, engendered a chronic political crisis. The finances of the bakufu and the domains were based on a rice economy. Taxes and samurai salaries were paid in rice, and their values were set as a predetermined quantity of rice. As society commercialized, the value measured in rice decreased. Commercialization, on the other hand, improved overall living standards. However, because the bakufu and domains collected taxes from agriculture but not from commercial activities, they ignored an increasingly lucrative source of revenue. Into the eighteenth century, the bakufu and many domains found themselves in chronic financial difficulties. Political and economic reform measures, mostly tax increases and consumption reduction hardly helped the situation. Heavier rice taxes only led to more frequent peasant rebellions (Vlastos 1990). Into the early nineteenth century, the deepening political and social crisis spurred the rise of emperor-centered political theories that called into question the legitimacy of the bakufu.

3.5 Crisis Within and Without

Compounding domestic political crises were demands from western powers to open the country for trade. Russians made the earliest appearance in the north around the turn of the nineteenth century, and their demands for trade were met with outright rejection by the bakufu, which resulted in several military conflicts. English and French ships arrived at Japan’s seashores from the south. The bakufu’s initial policy to forcefully dispel foreign ships softened after it learned, with surprise, about the defeat of Qing China in the Opium War of 1840–42. While the bakufu started building a modern military and strengthening coastal defenses in the 1840s, the U.S. warships commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry that arrived in Tokyo Bay in 1853 and 1854 showcased the strength of modern forms of military power. Unable to sustain its anti-foreign stance, the bakufu opened up the country and signed treaties with Western powers. The bakufu’s accommodating approach gave rise to anti-bakufu criticisms from imperial loyalists who intensified their advocacy for returning political power to the emperor. As the bakufu progressively lost its legitimacy and authority and the imperial institution was pushed to the symbolic center of politics, a group of young anti-bakufu warriors took the initiative in enacting a coup in the name of the emperor in January 1868 and went on to establish a new, modern, emperor-centered political state that by 1869 had successfully overthrown the Tokugawa bakufu.

4 East Meets West

“East meets West” is a distinctive way of looking at the past that is often seen in people whose viewpoint is of someone from Japan or China. But it was not the case that Europe,Footnote 7 the so-called “West,” only encountered Japan and China, the so-called “East.” In the same way, the West attempted to expand into North and South America, Africa, Oceania, and other regions, and created new knowledge about human beings and the world by integrating various information obtained from different parts of the globe. For example, in the Boston Tea Party incident of 1773, which triggered the American War of Independence, the people of the American colonies threw away their tea from a British East India Company ship. As this symbolizes, for good or bad, Europeans were active on the world stage and created a global exchange of goods with themselves at the center. A view of the past that focuses only on the encounter between “East” and “West” does not accurately reflect the reality of the world at that time.

However, from the sixteenth century onward, Europeans expanded into South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, both economically and later militarily. As a result, there is no doubt that the politics, economies, societies, cultures, and perceptions of the world in these regions have changed dramatically. The subsequent historical development of the Asian regions cannot be understood without considering the movements of European countries in the “West.” Therefore, from the perspective of people in these Asian regions, it is perhaps natural for them to perceive this as an “encounter between East and West.” In this sense, the title of this section is a good example of how the past can be seen differently in retrospect, depending on one’s position.

With this in mind, this section focuses on the period prior to the full-scale military expansion and colonization by European nations, i.e., until around 1750 in South and Southeast Asia, and until the beginning of the nineteenth century in East Asia. It will explain in detail the impact of European expansion on these regions and on the European countries themselves. For the sake of convenience, it will discuss the situation in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia separately. However, for Europeans at that time, these regions were collectively recognized as the “East Indies.” This is something that we must always bear in mind: that they engaged in their activities in a unified manner across these two spaces. It is also important to remember that the “encounter” and the accompanying changes in both societies occurred in parallel with the period of “prosperity” depicted in this chapter.

4.1 South and Southeast Asia

4.1.1 Portuguese Expansion

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the route from the coast of Africa southward to the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope became known, many Portuguese ships entered the Indian Ocean through this route, and established trading posts in the port towns along the coast, taking them by force of arms. From Malacca on the Malay Peninsula in the east to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf in the west, and Sofala and Kilwa on the east coast of Africa, trading posts scattered over a vast area of ocean were connected by this route, and the Portuguese Viceroy stationed in Goa in the western part of the Indian subcontinent controlled the entire area. The Portuguese royal family had a monopoly on trade between Portugal and the seas around Asia, which produced a wealth of products such as spices, textiles, dyes, ceramics, gold, silver, and precious stones.

For this reason, the entire network of bases and shipping routes is often called the Portuguese Maritime Empire (or Seaborne Empire), but in reality, the bases were only connected by lines, and the sea and its coasts were not all under the control of the Portuguese. The term “maritime empire” is a bit of an exaggeration. The land behind the bases was under the control of local rulers. Many Portuguese who came to the coasts of Asia broke away from the framework of the Portuguese royal monopoly and settled around these waters to start their own trade with the local people in the region. Such was the nature of the Portuguese, who first introduced guns to the Japanese archipelago aboard a Chinese ship in 1543.

During this period, local merchants along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, South China Sea and East China Sea were still actively engaged in intra-Asian trade as before. For those who lived along the coasts of Asia, bustling places where a variety of people came and went, there must have been no resistance to the Portuguese joining the trade. Nevertheless, the Portuguese maintained military bases, albeit limited to a small part of the coastline, and their trading style, using force to monopolize the trade of spices to Europe, was something that had not existed in these sea areas before. In particular, the islands of Southeast Asia, which were production regions for high-grade spices such as clove and nutmeg, were greatly affected. The Portuguese tried to manage commodity production and trade in an integrated manner, intervening in the production of spices and collecting goods in Malacca, which was under their jurisdiction. This new form of trade by the Portuguese was taken over and strengthened by the various East India Companies of Western Europe after the seventeenth century (Boxer 1969; Boyajian 2008; Newitt 2005; Oka 2010; Subrahmanyam 2012).

4.1.2 The Age of the East India Company

The East India Company, first founded in England in 1601Footnote 8 and then in the Netherlands the following year, entered the open sea space around the Indian Ocean by intervening in the business of the Portuguese, who had a monopoly on the maritime transport of spices and other goods between various parts of Asia and Western Europe. These companies issued stock certificates and collected funds from a large number of people, which they used to conduct trade within distant Asian waters in an organized and functional manner. In each country, the monopoly of the East India Company’s trade within Asian waters was granted by the monarchy or government of the country in question (Haneda 2007).

In seventeenth century Europe, spices were traded at high prices as valuable products, and their importation generated large profits. The English and Dutch East India Companies, having swept aside the Portuguese to become the predominant traders in the region, fought fiercely for control over trade in the islands of Southeast Asia, which were particularly rich in spices. The Dutch East India Company, which had established a base in Batavia on the island of Java, ended up winning the battle, and the defeated English East India Company began to concentrate on purchasing goods such as cotton textiles in South Asia. As well as spices and cotton textiles, products from Asian waters that were not produced in Europe, such as Chinese tea and ceramics, were very popular. These products greatly changed the daily lives of Europeans and triggered the Industrial Revolution. In addition, orders and requests from the East India Company led to an increase in the production of textiles and ceramics throughout Asia, and the development of new designs.

In order to purchase goods from Asian waters, the East India Company brought in silver from the Americas. The East India Company also brought in Japanese silver and copper in exchange for Chinese silk, South Asian cotton textiles, and sugar and dyes from Southeast Asia, which were in demand in Japan, and used them to pay for products from other coastal areas around Asia. In this way, the East India Company’s trade was not only between the coastal regions of Asia and Europe, but also incorporated trade conducted within Asian waters along with the trade of commodities with North and South America into its structure.

The East India Company is often regarded as the vanguard of European colonial rule. However, this is only how things appear to someone looking back at the past through the eyes of the present. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the company was nothing more than a trading company that transported products from various areas along the coasts of Asia to Europe for sale for a profit. Local bases were sometimes occupied by force, as in the case of Batavia, but most were built peacefully with the permission of the local rulers. It was a characteristic of royal authorities in South and Southeast Asia at that time that they did not reject outsiders but welcomed them and accommodated them if they wished to trade. In some cases, as in the case of Madras, the local ruler even offered land to attract the East India Company.

Added to this is the fact that the Mughal Empire was a powerful political power in South Asia at the time when the East India Company started its activities, and the company’s limited military power was not enough to compete with it. In fact, when the English East India Company’s troops fought against the Mughal army in Bengal in 1686, they suffered a crushing defeat. The local head of operations was reprimanded by the company’s head office, which questioned, “Why did you fight so recklessly even though we told you to avoid fighting like that? You should have focused on trading.” Even in Southeast Asia, where there was no power as strong as the Mughal Empire, the Dutch East India Company did not actively move to acquire colonies. Conflicts with the local authorities and the use of military force would require a large amount of money. Conquest by military force was not an attractive venture for a trading company that aimed to earn profits through trade.

The movement toward colonization began in the 1740s, when the British and French East India Companies became involved in conflicts between local rulers in South Asia and began to provide reinforcements. In the 1770s, the British government attempted to take direct control of the financially troubled East India Company, which was in a deteriorating financial situation and had lost its identity as a trading company. With this, the colonization of South Asia gained pace.

On the other hand, the colonization of the islands of Southeast Asia did not begin in earnest until the nineteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company was dissolved and the Dutch government began to directly engage in trade in East India. It was also in the nineteenth century that continental areas of Vietnam and Cambodia became colonies of France, and the Malay Peninsula became a colony of Great Britain.

4.2 East Asia

It was in the first half of the sixteenth century that Portuguese sailors and merchants appeared in the East China Sea in the eastern part of Asian waters. Catholic missionaries came with them to this area. Unlike South and Southeast Asia, the political powers of mainland China, the Korean Peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago around the East China Sea strictly controlled trans-oceanic trade, and the same was true for the Portuguese. Unlike South and Southeast Asia, where it was easy to establish trading posts, the Portuguese struggled to find a base of operations that would allow them to operate freely in these waters. In 1557, the Ming Dynasty government allowed the Portuguese to settle in Macau, but the city itself was under the control of the Ming Dynasty, and the Portuguese were only given leave to live there and nothing more. The powers on land, who possessed great military might, were making an attempt to restrict sea trade with foreign countries and bring it under their control, a move that was also significant in the sense of dealing with the Japanese pirates who were rampant in these waters at the time. The Portuguese military might, which had been so powerful along the coast of the Indian Ocean, was almost powerless in these waters.

Even under the Qing Dynasty, which succeeded the Ming Dynasty, trade with foreign countries, including Europeans, was strictly controlled by the government. In the 1680 s, when the anti-Qing forces on the seas were suppressed, people from coastal areas were allowed to sail abroad, and many people migrated to various parts of Southeast Asia. However, trade by the East India Company and private merchants from Europe was still controlled by the government, and in 1757, it was decided that European ships would only be allowed to visit Guangzhou. The British government sent the Macartney Embassy to the court of the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 in search of open trade, but they were unable to achieve their goal and returned home emptyhanded.

The situation was no different in Japan, which had been politically unified by the Tokugawa clan in the early seventeenth century. The Christian teachings propagated by Catholic missionaries, who often worked alongside the Portuguese, were unacceptable to the unified government. These missionaries taught that the faithful should obey the authority of God and the Pope, not the local political authorities. Initially, the Portuguese visited the ports of Kyushu relatively freely, but due to the presence of Catholic missionaries accompanying them, they were unable to gain the trust of the unified government and were banned from coming to Japan in the 1630 s. Instead, the Dutch East India Company was allowed to trade in Nagasaki, which was a shogunal demesne, on the condition that they did not bring Christianity with them. However, East India Company officials were allowed to reside only on Dejima, a small man-made island off the coast, and were strictly forbidden to bring in weapons. The Dutch East India Company’s trade in Nagasaki consisted of exchanging Asian goods, such as dyes and sugar from Southeast Asia and silk from China, for Japanese silver and copper. However, the annual reports from the Dutch on the state of affairs in various parts of the world, as well as the Dutch-language books that were offered as gifts, became an important source of information for the Japanese government and intellectuals on world affairs and modern science.Footnote 9

In order to protect its monopoly on the lucrative trade with Japan, the Dutch East India Company accepted all the demands of the Tokugawa government as a matter of principle. These included restrictions on trading ports, the number of ships that could come to Japan and the amount of silver and copper they could take out, the offering of curiosities to the shogun, and annual visits to Edo by the head of the Nagasaki trading post. Trade in Nagasaki was controlled by the Tokugawa government and not by the Dutch East India Company.

Thus, in East Asia before the nineteenth century, powerful governments in China, Korea, and Japan stably ruled, and the economic and military influence of European countries was extremely limited. On the other hand, products and crafts from China and Japan were brought to Europe and became popular. The political and cultural aspects of the Qing Dynasty, as reported by Jesuit missionaries, caused a kind of boom in Chinese culture among Europeans. Different from the situation in South Asia, European countries were not yet a serious threat in East Asia before the nineteenth century. However, this situation drastically changed.