Abstract
What trends did the volume of world trade follow during the ‘long nineteenth century’, the period from the late eighteenth century until the eve of the First World War, and how did regional shares change? It is not easy to provide an empirical answer to these questions because it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the volume of world trade, encompassing trading activities in all the continents, began to be captured with some degree of accuracy. Available data published by countries in the West, particularly the UK, is biased, reflecting the territorial expansion of Western powers and the resulting changes in the scope of interests and capacities of the information-gathering machinery. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to the history of growth in the trade of nation states, we can only capture a very small portion of the total, as this would mean that we take no account of the activities of Asian merchant networks, which dominated trade in the Indian Ocean and the East Asia Sea,1 the two spheres of regional trade that, along with the trading sphere of the Atlantic, constituted the three largest regional trading spheres centring on the sea during this period. Of course, if we want to extract information on the volume of trade during this age of maritime and river trade by junks and land transportation by draft animals from various statistical and descriptive materials, which were recorded in various ways in political entities around the world, primarily those belonging either to the territories of the Chinese and the Mughal empires or to those areas that the Western powers had turned into colonies or territorial possessions, it is necessary to perform a reconstruction.
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Notes
For recent discussions on the importance of each of the two trading spheres, see the following anthologies: Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., (with the collaboration of Om Prakash and Kaoru Sugihara), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009);
Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, eds., Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
A. G. Kenwood and A. L. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy 1820–2000: An Introductory Text (London: Routledge, 1999), fourth edition;
W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978);
James Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy: International Economic Relations Since 1850 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1995), second edition;
Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).
Efforts have been made lately to examine from many different perspectives the trading activities in Asia in the eighteenth century. On the whole, the findings of these studies suggest that the effects of both the British and the Dutch East India Companies on intra-Asian trade seem to have been much smaller during the eighteenth than the nineteenth century. For studies consciously comparing the East India Companies’ effects in the two centuries, see K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and
J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1967), 268–89.
This way of thinking is often associated with those subscribing to the dependency theory or the new dependency theory, including Raul Prebisch and Andre Gunder-Frank. In fact, it is much more commonly taken for granted. William Arthur Lewis, in the ‘open economy’ section of his influential ‘unlimited supplies of labour’ article, in effect postulates a causal relationship whereby the fixation of productivity differentials between the temperate and tropical zones has the effect of restricting the impact of long-distance trade on intra-regional trade. W. A. Lewis, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22, 2 (1954): 176–91.
Even though the high estimates Kenneth Pomeranz gave for living standards in advanced parts of Asia have been critically reassessed by subsequent empirical studies (as part of the controversy known as ‘the Great Divergence debate’), the estimated level of per capita GDP in Asia still appears to be slightly higher than was accepted by historians of Europe before the debate. This seems to suggest that Maddison’s data, which had been compiled when the debate was still in its early stages, may slightly underestimate living standards if we compare them with the currently accepted levels. With regard to the debate, see: Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and
Robert C. Allen, JeanPascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Wages, Prices and Living Standards in China, Japan and Europe, 1738–1925: In comparison with Europe, Japan, and India’, Economic History Review 64, S1 (2011): 8–38.
Paul Bairoch, ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750–1980’, Journal of European Economic History 11, 2 (1982): 269–333.
In his recent study, Tirthankar Roy has made clear in a multifaceted way that the handloom industry continued to remain broadly in existence and actually made some progress during the colonial period. This revised perspective does not deny deindustrialisation, however. Roy accepts that the effects of the influx of British cotton products were far-reaching, and that, as this chapter suggests with reference to Asia as a whole, both tendencies coexisted and both were important. See Tirthankar Roy, Rethinking Economic Change in India (London: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 5.
With regard to Maddison’s interest in trade statistics, see: Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Centre, OECD, 2001), 77–90 and Appendix F. It should be pointed out, however, that Maddison himself has not undertaken any close examination of the data for the first half of the nineteenth century.
Charles C. Stover, ‘Tropical Exports’, in Tropical Development, 1880–1913: Studies in Economic Progress, ed. W. Arthur Lewis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 47–9;
Paul Bairoch, ‘Geographical Structure and Trade Balance of European Foreign Trade from 1800 to 1970’, Journal of European Economic History 3, 1 (1974): 557–608;
Paul Bairoch, Commerce extérieur et développement économique de l’Europe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mouton, c.1976);
W. W. Rostow, The World Economy: History and Prospects (London: Macmillan, 1978);
John. R. Hanson, Trade in Transition: Exports from the Third World, 1840–1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1980);
W. Arthur Lewis, ‘The Rate of Growth of World Trade, 1830–1973’, in The World Economic Order: Past and Prospects, ed. Sven Grassman and Erik Lundberg (London: Macmillan, 1981), 11–81;
Paul Bairoch and Bouda Etemad, Structure par produits des exportations du Tiers-Monde, 1830–1937 [Commodity Structure of Third World Exports] (Geneva: Droz, 1985). In this chapter, all the data expressed in dollars has been converted to pounds at the exchange rate of 4.86 dollars to the pound.
These include: John MacGregor, Commercial Statistics: A Digest of the Productive Resources, Commercial Legislation, Customs Tariffs, Navigation, Port, and Quarantine Laws, and Charges, Shipping, Imports and Exports, and the Monies, Weights, and Measures of All Nations: Including All British Commercial Treaties with Foreign States (London: C. Knight, 1844–1850), five volumes (reprinted by RareBooksClub in 2012; and with titles varying among different volumes);
J. R. McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation, Posthumous and revised edition by Hugh G. Reid (London: Longmans and Green, 1871);
Michael G. Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics (London: Routledge, 1892), third edition (reprinted by Thoemmes Press and Kyokuto Shoten in 2000). The works of McCulloch and Mulhall have been published in several different editions, with one edition sometimes differing from others on important points.
An influential study by North on the formation of the regional division of labour is available. Moreover, relevant statistical data, such as for the volumes of trade on a state-by-state basis and on the volume of domestic transportation, are included in the BPP, as well as in United States, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Washington, DC, 1975, and the chapter on ‘Transportation’, in Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, millennial edition, Vol. 4. Economic Sectors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). To my knowledge, however, no estimates of domestic trade are available. To cite some of the well-known figures, in 1840, goods worth approximately ten million pounds sterling arrived in New Orleans, while the value of goods traded through the Ohio Canal amounted to approximately 1.1 million pounds. See: Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York: Norton, 1966), 250, 253.
Kaoru Sugihara, ‘The Resurgence of Intra-Asian Trade, 1800–1850’, in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, with the collaboration of Om Prakash and Kaoru Sugihara (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 139–69.
The rail-borne trade statistics were recorded by treating the three major port cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras essentially as entrepôt, similar to Singapore. See: Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Indo Kindaishi ni okeru Enkakuchi Boeki to Chiiki Koeki, 1868–1938 nen’ [Long-distance Trade and Regional Trade in Modern Indian History, 1868–1937], Toyo Bunka 82 (2002): 13.
I have in mind transactions similar to those which are dealt with, for example, in the following two works: Hajime Kose, ‘19-seikimatsu Chugoku Kaikojo-kan Ryutsu no Kozo: Eiko o Chushin to shite’ [The Structure of Commodity Distribution among Chinese Treaty Ports in the Late 19th Century: An Analysis Focusing on Bayuquan] Shakai Keizai Shigaku 54–5 (1989): 30–58, and Yoshinori Kigoshi, Kindai Chugoku to Koiki Shijoken: Kaikan Tokei ni yoru Makuroteki Apurochi [Modern China and Extended Market Spheres: A Macroscopic Approach based on Customs Statistics] (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2012).
Chengming Wu, Zhongguo zibenchuyi yu guonei shichang [Chinese Capitalism and the Domestic Market] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe [China Social Sciences Press], 1985), 251.
H. F. Howard, Report on the Operations of the Currency Department, the Movement of Funds and on the Resource Operations of the Government of India, 1913–14 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1914), 77–8.
Jitendra Borpujari, ‘The Impact of the Transit Duty System in British India’, in Trade and Finance in Colonial India, 1750–1860, ed. Asiya Siddiqi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 321–44.
A typical perception runs as follows: In the nineteenth century, world trade was almost a synonym for European trade, so completely did European countries dominate the picture. But trading activity gradually spread outwards to include other regions in its network; first North America whose share in exports has risen since the 1870’s from 11 to 27 per cent, then more recently and, apart from Japan, more gradually the remaining countries. P. Lamartine Yates, Forty Years of Foreign Trade (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 10.
By way of contrast, Bairoch’s estimates put the value of Europe’s exports in 1800 at approximately 140 million pounds, a figure slightly smaller than that in 1840. This figure is significantly larger than is estimated by other studies (see Figure 2.4). Paul Bairoch, ‘European Foreign Trade in the XIXth Century: The Development of the Value and Volume of Exports (Preliminary Results)’, Journal of European Economic History 2, 1 (Spring 1973): 8.
See the Rousseaux Price Indices in B. R. Mitchell (with Phyllis Deane), Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 471–73.
The total of the three figures of exports and re-exports presented in the maritime customs’ statistics agrees quite well with the total of the volumes of foreign and domestic products. To comment on some of the relevant estimates, Thomas G. Rawski estimated, in his Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 220, the quantities (ton-kilometres) transported in the period from 1895 to 1936 by railways, steamships, junks and other means of land transport, respectively, and calculated that steamships accounted for 27.9 per cent of domestic transactions in 1907. On the other hand, Wu Chengming, ‘Kindai Chugoku ni okeru Hanshokuminchi-Hanhokenteki Kokunai Shijo’ [Semi-Colonial and Semi-Feudal Domestic Market in Modern China], trans. Akinobu Kuroda, under the auspices of Chugoku Kindaishi Kenkyukai and Makoto Ikeda) Ritsumeikan Hogaku 177, 178 (1984): 709, estimated that in 1936 or thereabouts, ‘the volume of cargoes transported by railways, automobiles, junks and other means’ (in areas other than the Northeast district) amounted to approximately three times that carried by steamships. Wu made other estimates, but unlike Wu — who estimated the volume of domestic trade by multiplying only the transportation volume of domestic products appearing in the maritime customs statistics by a factor of four, and assumed that foreign products were distributed within the country only by steamships — in this chapter I estimate the volume of domestic trade to be three times the total cargo transportation volume shown in the maritime customs statistics. I am greatly indebted to Professor Hajime Kose (Ryukoku University) for supplying me with relevant pieces of bibliographical and statistical information, and for instructing me on how to interpret them. I would also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor Toru Kubo (Shinshu University) for giving me useful comments and advice.
See: S. B. Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960), Chapter 3.
Marc Flandreau, The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism, and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard, 1848–1873 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The assessment of the historical implications of the absorption of silver by Asia is no more than an inference I have drawn from a table presented on p. 17 of this book.
One factor that contributed to stabilising the gold-silver parity seems to have been the fact that India’s use of silver coins, which had greatly declined during the great depression, became active again towards the end of the nineteenth century. See: Howard, Report, 77, and Takeshi Nishimura, ‘20-seiki Shotou no Indo ni okeru Gin Ryutsu’ [Circulation of Silver in India in the early 20th Century], Shakai Keizai Shigaku 68, 6 (2003): 75–90.
Atsushi Kobayashi, ‘19-seiki Zenhan ni okeru Tonan-ajia Ikinaikoeki no Seicho: Shingaporu Chukai Shonin no Yakuwari’ [The Growth of Intra-regional Trade in Southeast Asia in the First Half of the 19th Century: The Role of the Middlemen in Singapore], Shakai Keizai Shigaku 78, 3 (2012): 421–43.
Okurasho Kanzeikyoku [Ministry of Finance, Customs Bureau], Dainihon Gaikokuboeki Nenpyo [Annual Tables of the Foreign Trade of Greater Japan], 1 (1910): 2.
For an overview of trade policy, see: Paul Bairoch, ‘European Trade Policy, 1815–1914’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. VIII, The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, ed. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–160.
A. E. Musson, ‘The “Manchester School” and the Exportation of Machinery’, in Protectionism in the World Economy, ed. Forest Capie (1992/1972), 152–61;
Douglas A. Farnie, ‘The Role of the Cotton Industry in Economic Development’, in The Fibre that Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s, ed. Douglas A. Farnie and David Jeremy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 562–63.
For an overall assessment of the British contribution to the formation of the industrialisation-oriented trade regime, see: Sidney Pollard, ‘British Trade and European Economic Development (1750–1850)’, in The Nature of Industrialization, Vol.5, International Trade and British Economic Growth from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, ed. Peter Mathias and John A. Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 34–55.
John V. C. Nye, War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
In this connection, it is also pointed out that a general expansion of trade did not take place during this period, but instead that tariff negotiations had the effect of expanding the trade of strategic goods (including cotton products). Markus Lampe, ‘Effects of Bilateralism and the MFN Clause on International Trade: Evidence for the Cobden-Chevalier Network, 1860–1875’, Journal of Economic History 69, 4 (2009): 1012–40.
Bryan Coutain, ‘The Unconditional Most-Favored-Nation Clause and the Maintenance of the Liberal Trade Regime in the Postwar 1870s’, International Organization 63 (2009): 139–75.
See: Naosuke Takamura, Nihon Shihonshugi-ron: Sangyo Shihon, Teikokushugi, Dokusen Shihon [A Treatise on Japanese Capitalism: Industrial Capital, Imperialism, and Monopoly Capital] (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo, 1980), 73–5; Shintaro Kawashima, Honpo Tsusho Seisaku Joyaku-shi Gairon [An Introduction to the History of the Commercial Policy and Treaties of Japan] (Tokyo: Ganshodo-shoten, 1941), 72–92, 112–22. It should be kept in mind, however, that Japan did not adopt a double tariff system. In trying to place European tariff policies in a global context, I benefited from conversations with Mr Toshiya Kawashima (Graduate School of Economics, the University of Tokyo). I would like to express my gratitude to him.
Shigeru Akita, Igirisu Teikoku to Ajia Kokusai Chitsujo: Hegemoni Kokka kara Teikokuteki na Kozoteki Kenryoku e [The British Empire and the International Order of Asia: From the Hegemonic State to the Structured Power] (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2003), 156–83, 238–47; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism,1688–2000, 2nd edition (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 16–17, assert that the City’s financial and service interests supported industrialisation in many other regions (especially during the inter-war period), and thereby contributed to expediting the process of decolonisation.
For works questioning these earlier views, see: Takeshi Hamashita and Heita Kawakatsu, eds., Ajia Koekiken to Nihon Kogya, 1500–1900 [The Asian Trading Sphere and the Industrialisation of Japan, 1500–1900] (Tokyo: Riburopoto, 1991) (new edition, Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2001);
Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Kindai Ajia Keizaishi niokeru Renzoku to Danzetsu: Kawakatsu Heita, Hamashita Takeshi shi no Shosetsu o Megutte’ [Continuity and Discontinuity in Modern Asian Economic History: A Critique of the Works of Professors Kawakatsu and Hamashita], Shakai Keizai Shigaku 62, 3 (August–September, 1996): 80–102. For more recent studies that strongly emphasise the continuity in the nineteenth century, see:
Naoto Kagotani and Kohei Wakimura, eds., Teikoku to Ajia Nettowaku: Choki no 19-seiki [Empires and the Asian Networks: The Long Nineteenth Century], (Kyoto: Sekai Shisosha, 2009);
E Murakami, Umino Kindai Chugoku: Fukkenjin no Katsudo to Igirisu, Shincho [Maritime History of Modern China: Local Fujian Actors and the British and Chinese Empires] (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2013).
See: Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara, eds., Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013).
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Sugihara, K. (2015). Asia in the Growth of World Trade: A Re-interpretation of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’. In: Bosma, U., Webster, A. (eds) Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463920_2
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