Derek Massarella’s Lecture: The East India Company, Japan, and the Globalising World of the Seventeenth Century

Text of a lecture given by Professor Derek Massarella at the School of Oriental and African Studies on 15 March 2013 as part of Japan400

In the autumn of 1602, Japan’s new hegemon, and soon-to-be shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, wrote to Pedro Bravo de Acuña, the governor of the Philippines, thanking him for his recent letter and gifts. He noted that although the letter and gifts had come from someone he had never seen, they reminded him that the peoples among the four seas were all one family (ikka). Ieyasu hoped that trade between Japan and Mexico would flourish and reminded the governor that the galleons sailing from Manila to Mexico would benefit from having access to a port in the Kanto area where they could seek refuge in tempestuous weather. He reaffirmed his determination to stamp out pirates in Japanese waters and authorised the governor to execute Japanese who broke the law in the Philippines.

In December 1615, Ralph Coppindale wrote from Hirado in Japan to his colleagues in Pattani, Siam, that:

Ether, I say, we must p’cure a peaceable trade in China or elles, as the Hollanders doe, to trade w’th them per force. And yf we sett foote in the Moluccoes [the Spice Islands, Maluku in present-day Indonesia] this place will be a fitt storehouse from whence we may alwaies have men, munition and victualles, good store and at reasonable rates, for w’ch purpose principally the Hollanders doe mentaine this factory.

In January 1621, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, in Batavia, Jan Pietersz. Coen, wrote to his superiors, the Heren XVII, the directors of the company, that the Portuguese, and by extension the Spanish as Portugal and Spain

had been united under Habsburg rule since 1580, could dispatch a capital estimated to be worth millions of guilders from Europe to finance their trade in Asia, and that this trade made it possible to maintain the Estado da Índia and increase the riches of New Spain “whereby the enemy acquires greater resources to crush the United Netherlands and vex all of Europe.”

In 1627 Martin Castaño, procurator-general of the Philippines advised Philip IV about the strategic importance of the Philippine Islands:

while you are master and lord of the Filipinas, your crown encircles and embraces all the world….[I]f the enemy [i.e. the Netherlands] succeeds in getting possession of the Filipinas, toward which end he is putting forth so great effort, not only will this richest fragment of your Majesty’s crown be lost, but the enemy will make himself master of Portuguese India immediately; and then by way of the South Sea, he will disturb Piru and Nuevaespaña ….All the kings and nations of the world are watching to see who comes out ahead in this undertaking – your Majesty or the rebels of Olanda.

These four illustrations, and one could add several more, show that around 1613, when the English East India Company established a trading factory in Hirado, four years after the VOC had done so, far from being divided, the distant parts of the world had

become inter-connected. In trade, culture and international relations, unprecedented levels of global encounter were taking place. What happened in one part of the Eurasian or American landmasses implicated the other parts. This was the beginning of an age of, to borrow Professor Jan de Vries’s, not altogether satisfactory, label ‘soft’ globalisation.

This can be characterised, I suggest, as a world in which, social, economic and international relations, or world orders, were liberated, or disembedded, to an unprecedented degree, from local and regional contexts and constraints, permitting greater involvement, interaction and exposure (not always welcome) with places, people, commodities and conflicts across the globe.

In 1613, when the English East India Company arrived in Japan, this phenomenon was already well-established Adam Smith’s famous and influential assertion, lifted from the Abbé Raynal, that “[t]he discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind”,

although clearly an exaggeration, has a ring of truth about it, so long as it is not construed to mean that the Europeans changed the world according to their priorities and whims after 1492 and 1497.

They certainly changed the face of Central America and a large part of South America, but they did not transform the political and trading worlds of the East Indies after 1497, at least not until the mid-eighteenth century. Rather, after 1497, they had to adapt, or accommodate, to those worlds, or, with a few exceptions where they could use force decisively to get their way, face commercial defeat, as the English found out in Hirado, which they abandoned in 1623, or even expulsion, as the Spanish and Portuguese discovered in Japan. What Professor Kenneth Pomeranz has called ‘the great divergence’,

the time when European growth rates parted company decisively from the rest of Eurasia, in particular China, did not occur until around 1750 when Europe, or rather England, precisely why remains controversial, unlocked the secrets of selfsustaining economic growth, which subsequently gave it, and its transatlantic offspring, the United States, a brief period of global hegemony, the end of which we might, or might not, be witnessing.

Be that as it may, by 1600 one can talk about the existence of a global economy, excluding Australasia, which, in the immortal words of Mr Donald Rumsfeld, was a ‘known unknown’. For the first time in human history, trade in commodities was both transoceanic and intercontinental. This was made possible by one commodity in particular: silver. In 1545, in the upper reaches of the Andes, at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, the Spanish discovered the largest silver mines the world has ever known, accounting for over 80 per cent of world silver output between 1493 and 1800.

Such a vast quantity of silver shipped from the New World could not be absorbed solely by the Old World. Fortunately for Europe (and for the development of the world economy), a huge demand for silver had arisen on the other side of Eurasia, in China, which, during the sixteenth century, was undergoing one of its periodic monetary crises.

Silver had become vital to the functioning of the Chinese economy as confidence in paper money, which the Chinese had, of course, invented, and coin, as stores of value, had evaporated.

The Single Whip reforms instituted by the Ming in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries added to silver’s importance in the economy. Broadly speaking, and with differing degrees of implementation and success across the empire, these reforms aimed to transform the collection of tax revenue from payments in labour and kind to payment in silver.

This policy coincided with the near exhaustion of China’s indigenous silver resources. To satisfy the huge demand generated by the Single Whip reforms, and other pressures, silver was imported on a vast scale. Estimates vary, but from 1550 to 1645, corresponding approximately with the final century of the Ming dynasty, and aptly named China’s ‘silver century’, China imported some 7,300 metric tons of silver.

The main source of China’s silver imports was Japan. By the end of the sixteenth century, thanks to new mining technology acquired from Korea, Japan was a major producer and exporter of silver. There was, however, a catch. Official relations between China and Japan were strained and finally cut in 1557, a consequence of a renewed outburst of wakō, or pirate, attacks along China’s coasts. The violence, which peaked in the 1530s, was fuelled by resentment over the Ming government’s restrictions on overseas trade. Although the Ming authorities blamed the Japanese for the lawlessness, much of the leadership of the wakō, and a sizeable part of the rank and file, were Chinese, based in Japan, operating from bases in and around Kyushu, taking advantage of the turmoil and lawlessness of Japan’s civil wars which raged throughout most of the sixteenth century.

The Portuguese, who had originally been wholly unimpressed by the first reports they heard about Japan in Malacca after 1511,

reached Japan, as is well-known, by chance, in 1543, but, at a highly opportune moment. Given the diplomatic standoff
between China and Japan, the Portuguese were, for a while, the sole carriers of Sino-Japanese trade, which consisted mainly of the exchange of Chinese silk for Japanese silver. One Chinese observer, Yao Shilin, commented in the 1590s that “[n]early all the needs of Japan [he meant luxuries] are supplied with products from China”, clearly an exaggeration.

Again estimates vary, but Japanese silver exports to China between 1550-1645 have been put at between 3,622 and 3,802 metric tons, over 50 per cent of total Chinese silver imports during the silver century.

The exchange of silk for silver between China and Japan was one of the most profitable trades in Asia. Without access to steady supplies of Chinese silk, trade with Japan could never be profitable.

In the 1610s the English and Dutch factors in Japan were aware of this. But the merchants of the English factory, lacking capital and suitable goods to engage profitably in this trade, placed, or rather misplaced, most of their hopes on gaining access to China, and Chinese silk, primarily on forging an alliance with the head of one of the most profitable Chinese trading networks in East Asia, Li Tan, but also on sending junks to various southeast Asian entrepôts, the most important of which was Faifo, or Hoi An, in present-day Vietnam, to acquire Chinese silk. The factory only made a profit when it had rare access to abundant quantities of Chinese silk plundered from Chinese vessels during the two voyages of the Anglo-Dutch Fleets of Defence in 1620-22. Even then the profits from this booty were diluted by the immense volume of illicit private trading which went on, from which, according to William Eaton, one of the English merchants in Japan, writing after the return of the first voyage to Hirado, many individuals ‘haue made a better voyage then our Imployers haue done”, a considerable understatement, but a sentiment which Coen shared, blaming the fiasco on the ill-governed English.

As for the VOC, during their early Hirado years, they attacked Chinese and Portuguese shipping to secure silk but, according to the orders of the directors in the Netherlands, and indeed the company’s charter, sent most of this precious commodity to Europe.

In this respect, at least, the VOC’s strategy in Japan in the 1610s was no better then that of the English company.

Why was it so attractive to so many people around the world to want to satisfy China’s demand for silver? According to earlier accounts of Euro-Asian trade in the early modern period, the Europeans had to export silver in order to pay for Asian commodities because they had no manufactures that Asians wanted to consume. The lack of suitable commodities is well-illustrated by the English company’s experience in Japan from 1613-1623. The company tried to sell English wool and other assorted English commodities, such as galley pots, the kind of “trash” (his word) Sir Thomas Roe, England’s first ambassador to India, to the Mughal court, complained about having to sell in India.

This interpretation of Euro-Asian trade has been challenged, convincingly, particularly in the light of David Ricardo’s theory of comparative costs.

According to Ricardo, as interpreted by Professors K. N. Chaudhuri, Dennis Flynn and others, silver and gold (not be conflated under the misleading term ‘precious metals’) should be viewed not as money but as commodities. The influx of silver from the New World to Europe increased the money supply pushed up prices, expanded demand and encouraged spending, a kind of early-modern manifestation of quantitative easing. Fortunately for the Europeans, they could use the New World-silver, and the silver from Japan, to stimulate and satisfy their demand for Asian goods by transferring silver from parts of the world where it was a low cost commodity, to China, where it had become a high cost commodity, a country which paid for its silver imports by exporting the excess of commodities which it had in plenty: silk, porcelain, gold, and, later, tea.

Gold could be exchanged for silver in China at a rate of between 1:6 and 1:8 from 1550 until about 1650. In Europe the rate was about 1:12, in Persia 1:10, and in India 1:8.

The Chinese ratio converged with the European one in the middle of the seventeenth century but deviated again from it in the first half of the eighteenth century as China’s territory, economy and population expanded and European demand for Chinese goods increased, creating another short-lived burst of demand for silver in China.

So long as these exchange rates existed, it made sound business sense to shift commodities around the globe. This had nothing to do with modern industrial or financial capitalism, nor did it create self-sustaining economic growth anywhere in the world; nor, in itself, did it cause the Great Divergence. It was simply a matter of arbitrage: profiting from different prices in different markets.

One result of this arbitrage is that, in Professor Pomeranz’s words, “it becomes hard not to see China’s silver demand as every bit as much an ‘active’ force in creating a global economy as well as the West’s demand for porcelain, tea, and so on”,

and, I would add, resource-rich Japan should be numbered among those active forces. Not all scholars are enthusiastic about the importance of Euro-Asian trade for the early modern European economy. Professor de Vries has estimated that the value of Asian imports to Britain, France and the Netherlands in the 1770s was the equivalent of 11.5 per cent of all their imports, and that for “Europe as a whole, the figure would certainly have stood well under 10 percent.” The Atlantic trade, on the other hand, amounted to 31 per cent of those countries imports. According to his calculations, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the end of the ‘classic’ period of the north European trading companies, “the total volume of goods sent from all of Asia to all of Europe measured approximately 50,000 tons — the carrying capacity of one large container ship of today”, a sobering prospect.

As for Japan, Professor Conrad Totman has estimated that the value of Japan’s foreign trade at the end of the seventeenth century was “equivalent to less than 1.5 percept of domestic agricultural production”.

Even so, the influence of Europe’s direct trade with Asia, and the importance of Japan’s foreign trade in the early modern period, should not be downplayed. Professor Maxine Berg has argued that Eurasian trade was important for European industrialisation because “[i]mports of manufactured luxury and fashion goods prompted a process of product innovation leading to industrialization.”

What starts out as imitation, or as Professor Berg puts it “’making the East in the West’” (the stated goal, and, incidentally, a reversal of the old putdown of Japan as a nation of imitators), leads to improvement over the original, at least from the consumers’ perspective, and, ultimately, the triumph of the upstart.

The point is well-made by Malachy Postlethwayt who, in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, published in 1757, stressed that “in whatever mechanical or manufactured arts other nations may excel Great Britain, our artists should

be upon the watch, not only to imitate, but surpass, if possible….Those which are imported, and which they can see, handle and minutely examine, they are most like to imitate or excel.”

The point had already been made by Henry Martyn in 1701 in his Considerations upon the East-India Trade (republished in 1721 as The Advantages of the East India Trade to England Considered).

Postlethwayt’s tract reflects how mainstream the argument had become. However one cares to interpret the early modern world economy, it was not an open economy and neither Europeans nor Asians were believers in free trade and open markets, either at home or abroad. In the early modern period all countries attempted to protect what their rulers conceived of as the national interest, what David Hume later called, and condemned, the ‘jealousy of trade’.

But what contemporaries understood as the national interest, or indeed the national economic interest was very different from our understanding today. Economic thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was concerned not about limitless possibilities but with constraints and the need to control and regulate society to achieve harmony and maintain stability. Ruling elites in Europe, China and Japan viewed commercial activity as a vital activity for their polities but one, that if left unregulated, could prove harmful and disruptive to the maintenance of the social and political order.

In both England and Japan rulers judged foreign long-distance trade as a privilege, something in their gift, and, of course, something from which they benefited handsomely. The shogun issued passes for overseas voyages embossed with his vermillion seal (shuinjō) defying anyone to attack the shipping possessed of one; the English monarch issued a charter under the great seal granting a select body of merchants privileges permitting them to conduct, either in the form of a regulated or a joint-stock company, a particular long distance trade. The shogun’s power to issue and rescind such rights was not challenged. The pretensions of the British monarch in matters of trade (and, by extension, those of the powerful, well-connected merchants, landowners and courtiers who benefited from royal largesse) were. The monarch’s claims were stated forcefully in 1606 in a ruling by Chief Baron Fleming of the Exchequer against a Levant merchant, John Bate, who had refused to pay an imposition exacted by the crown on imported currants, and was sent to prison for his defiance. James had pursued the case to clarify his rights to levy such impositions, and the ruling did not disappoint him. Fleming, articulating an absolutism that was not to prove enduring in England, declared that “all commerce and affairs with foreigners, all wars and peace, all acceptance and admitting for current, foreign coin, all parties and treaties whatsoever, are made by the absolute power of the King…No exportation or importation can be but at the King’s ports, they are the gates of the King, and he hath absolute power by them to include or exclude whom he shall please”.

It would take a civil war, the public beheading of a king, and a ‘glorious’ revolution to demolish, alas not permanently, the claims of absolute monarchical power asserted in this ruling and to secure the foundations for the fiscal-military state that transformed England (after 1707, Great Britain) from a second rank offshore European power into a nascent global hegemon. The shogunate, on the other hand, could restructure Japan’s overseas trade by issuing decrees at will in the 1630s curtailing, and finally outlawing completely, Japanese voyages overseas, with the exception of those to Korea and Ryukyu, confident that the merchants, whose status was at the base of the neo-Confucian social hierarchy the early Tokugawa were asserting, dared not protest. There was, of course, no John Bate in Japan. Nor were there any corresponding institutions through which such an individual could have sought redress.

In the light of such controversy at home over the king’s power to open or close the gates of the kingdom, Richard Cocks’s protests against the shogunate’s decision to curtail the trading privileges of the English in Japan in 1616 were a case of protesting too much. Cocks lobbied hard and astutely, but in vain, to have the original trading privileges restored. He argued that the original privileges should remain lest “my Soveraigne Lord King James would think it to be our misbehaviours that cauced our privelegese to be taken from us, & that it stood me upon as much as my life was worth to get it amended, otherwais I knew not how to show my face in England.”

His words were wasted. Interestingly, however, his contrived but calculated pleas (he was more concerned about what his employers would have to say about his stewardship of their affairs than about James I’s reactions) about the duties of subjects to their sovereigns sounded uncannily like the sort of neo-Confucian ideals the early Tokugawa were fostering, a reminder that, in a number of important respects, the worlds of Japan and Europe were not as dissimilar in the early modern period as they were in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Americans and Europeans, the so-called ‘West’, came calling, demanding that Japan ‘open up’.

The regulation and ordering of trade did not, of course, mean antipathy to trade, either in Japan or England. Tokugawa Ieyasu built on Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s expansion of foreign trade, but he did not pursue the latter’s disastrous ambitions for Japanese hegemony over the Asian mainland. The number of shuinsen, or officially recognised Japanese voyages overseas, increased dramatically and, for a while, at exactly the time when the English arrived in Japan, Ieyasu was interested in establishing trade relations with the Spanish, both in Manila and in New Spain. His timing was bad. In a mercantilist age, trade could not be separated from global strategic considerations.

Despite the warm, friendly tone of Ieyasu’s letter to the governor of the Philippines in September 1602, mentioned at the beginning, the Spanish were suspicious of Ieyasu’s overtures for reasons other than purely economic, although one should not downplay the importance of economic factors. Their experience of Hideyoshi’s policy towards the Philippines, at times warm, at times bellicose, even demanding that the Spanish send a tributary mission to Japan, an affront to Spanish reputación or esteem, had made them wary of the island empire to the north of their fragile Asian colony, where a census taken in 1584 revealed a total of only 713 Spanish males living in the archipelago and a woeful lack of firearms.

The Spanish believed that the best cards they held to counter any possible Japanese expansionist ambitions were Japan’s poor skills in shipbuilding and deep-sea navigation. They brushed aside Ieyasu’s requests for developmental assistance to remedy these deficiencies and, oddly, an additional request for mining experts to be sent from Mexico to help improve Japan’s mining technology. Even so Japan was vital to Spain’s global strategy, and not only in East Asia.

Since 1567, Spain had been attempting to crush the most serious challenge to Habsburg power in Europe, the revolt of the Netherlands, the Dutch quest to gain independence from Spanish rule, a revolt which by 1600 had evolved into a global struggle between the Dutch and the world’s first global empire, Spain, and a struggle in which commerce quickly became an extension of warfare, as Coen’s comments, mentioned at the beginning, show. It was not the first time, nor, alas, the last, that the Europeans exported their conflicts at great cost to the non-European world. In Asia, before 1600 the Dutch and Spanish had already engaged in skirmishes in the Philippines, and, in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch began to attack Portuguese settlements in the Spice Islands. The confrontation increased over the following years as the VOC attempted, and finally succeeded, in driving out their European rivals from the islands and engrossing the spice trade.

After 1600 Japan became another focus of this global struggle with the arrival of the first non-Portuguese European vessel in Japan, the Dutch ship the Liefde, among whose crew was the Englishman, William Adams, the most overrated individual in the history of the early modern Euro-Asian encounter. The Dutch and English East India companies arrived in 1609 and 1613 respectively and inter-confessional jockeying broke out immediately. The Protestant and Catholic Europeans denounced each other to the Japanese authorities, in identical language, as thieves and robbers. The Spanish, afraid of a possible Dutch-Japanese alliance to attack Manila, insisted, especially during the embassy of Sebastián Vizcaíno from Mexico in 1612, that the Dutch should be expelled from Japan, a demand the shogunate refused to entertain and one of the reasons why Hispano-Japanese relations turned sour.

The Spanish, Dutch and English, as is clear from Coppindale’s comments mentioned at the beginning, all recognised the value of Japan as a supply base to further their war aims, as did the shogunate, whose investments in Portuguese vessels trading with Japan were threatened by such aggression, hence the new restrictions imposed on the English and Dutch in 1621 (a ban on the hiring or the indenturing of Japanese for service overseas and an embargo on weapons exports), the ‘ticklish points’ John Osterwick mentions in a letter from Hirado in September of that year.37 These restrictions were the final nail in the coffin of English direct with trade Japan from where the English company withdrew in 1623 at the same time closing other unprofitable factories in southeast Asia.

For the Dutch things were quite different in East Asia. After 1624, when they got their toehold on Taiwan, another front in the war against Spain, and established a colony with its impressive headquarters in Fort Zeelandia, in present-day Tainan, they gained stable access to Chinese silk and other desirable commodities, such as deerskins, for export to Japan, and reversed their policy of re-exporting the silk that came their way, mainly through pillage, to the Netherlands.

They now competed legitimately, as it were, with the shuinsen, Chinese and Portuguese for a share of the Japan market.

Over the following years, Dutch success in Japan owed much to good fortune, as had been the case earlier with the Lusitanians. The Dutch reaped the economic windfall of Japan’s anti-Christian laws, first enacted in 1614, the departure of the English in 1623, the expulsion of the Spanish in 1624, the banning of overseas voyages by Japanese in 1635, and the ouster of the Portuguese in 1639. They took over Portugal’s erstwhile role in carrying silk, which they acquired in Taiwan and later in Bengal, to Japan in return for silver, although the volume of their trade with Japan remained far less than that of the Chinese trading with Japan. Until 1668, when the shogunate curtailed silver exports, Japan was the principle source of silver with which the VOC financed its trade in Asia and with Europe, as well as being a major source of copper, which the Dutch traded profitably in Europe, and where it was highly esteemed.

No wonder the Dutch held a service of thanksgiving in Batavia (present-day Jacarta) to celebrate the expulsion of the Lusitanians from Japan and successfully lobbied the Japanese not to readmit the English when the East India Company came calling again in 1673, in an attempt to reopen trade with Japan. The attempt was the fruit of a more carefully thought-out strategy this time, which aimed to use Tonkin and Taiwan, where the English established a factory in 1672 and from where the Dutch had been defeated and expelled in ignominy in 1662 by the Ming loyalist forces of Zheng Chenggong, Koxinga, as hubs to feed the Japan trade.

Despite their humiliating setback on Taiwan, the Dutch, nevertheless, continued to prosper. With the conquest of Makassar in 1669 they finally won the struggle for mastery of the Spice Islands and control over the production and export of spices. The United Provinces flourished, Amsterdam became the Venice of the North and the Dutch were admired and despised for their achievements, not least by the English.

As always, however, success came at a price. The costs of war and domination were high as was obvious, not only to outsiders but also to the directors of the VOC themselves, although just how high only became apparent when the gross margins from their sales of Asian goods in Europe began to fall after 1670.

That shrewd observer, Sir Thomas Roe warned the directors of the English company against adopting the empirebuilding
policies advocated by Coen. “A warr and trafique are incompatible” he stated,
“It is the beggering of the Portugal….He never profited by the Indyes, since he defended them….It hath been also the error of the Dutch, who seeke the plantation heere by the sword….Let this bee received as a rule that, if yow will profitt, seeke it at sea, and in quiett trade; for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons and land warrs in India”.

Wise counsel that remained a guiding principle of the company, at least as far as affecting garrisons and land wars in India was concerned, until the second half of the eighteenth century when the company was in fact transformed from a trading entity into a territorial power in India, much to the profit and advantage of the company, and the British state, a transformation that marked the end of the era of ‘soft’ globalisation and the dawn of the age of empire.

As for the Dutch triumph at Makassar, pepper and spices were the spoils of yesterday’s battles. The future belonged to other commodities: Indian textiles, coffee, silk and tea, which were changing the pattern of European consumption, and all of which were available in areas where the Dutch did not (India) and could not (China) forcefully enter and dominate local markets as they had done in the Spice Islands and on Java, albeit at considerable financial cost. Moreover, the VOC’s trade with Japan was on the wane by the end of the seventeenth century as the Japanese imposed strict new quotas on the volume of foreign trade. On top of all this, there was another more serious problem: the manner in which the company conducted its trade with China. The Dutch company’s policy of depending on Chinese junks and, to a lesser extent, on the free burghers of Batavia to conduct the trade between Batavia and China placed the VOC at a serious disadvantage when the Qing dynasty made foreign trade independent of tributary relations and opened it to all comers at Canton. The Dutch found themselves captives of the economic reality of their colonial city of Batavia whose fortunes had become too closely entwined with the junk trade to China. Ending or curtailing the junk trade by introducing direct voyages between the Netherlands and China (essential to maintain the freshness of the tea) ran the risk of inflicting a fatal blow on the city’s economy.

As for the English, rather than becoming the stepping-stone to a renewed direct trade with Japan, the Taiwan factory had given the English company its entrée into China proper when, after the defeat of the Zheng clan by the Qing imperial navy in 1683, the factory was moved to Amoy and eventually to Canton. The English gained their entrée not because they possessed a superior strategy vis-à-vis the Dutch (the English company’s principal objective in seeking readmission to Japan in 1673 was, as it had been in 1613, the sale of English manufacture, i.e. wool and textiles, in Japan, where there was not much of a market); nor because of a superior knowledge about the contemporary situation in east Asia (the company’s understanding of the mid-century dynastic change in China was woefully inadequate); nor, indeed, because they had learned from their earlier mistakes in the region. They did so because of luck, at last being in the right place at the right time and, most importantly, able and determined to capitalise on the new opportunities coming their way.

The China trade thus became the unintended consequence of a thwarted Japan trade, and, by the early decades of the eighteenth century, there was no way that the English would have exchanged their new-found, highly profitable trade for the illusive trade with Japan, certainly not for all the tea in China.

1 Murakami Naojirō (ed.), Zotei ikoku nikki shō, Tokyo 1929 (published in a single volume with Ikoku ōfuku shokanshū), pp. 243-44, esp. p. 244; Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, edited by W. E. Retna, Madrid, 1909, p. 441.

2 Anthony Farrington (ed.), The English Factory in Japan, 2 vols, London, 1991, 1, p. 343,

3 Jan Pietersz. Coen, Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, edited by H. T.Colenbrander, 7 vols in 8, s’-Gravenhage, 1919-1953, 1, p. 690.

4 E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson (eds), The Philippine Islands, 55 vols, Cleveland, 1903-1909, 22, pp. 127-28.

5 Jan De Vries, ‘The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World’, Economic History Review, 63:3, 2010, p.711.

6 On ‘disembedding’, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 21-22.

7 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, The Cannan Edition, Tokyo, 1979, p. 590; J. H.Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492-1650, Cambridge, 1992, p. 1.

8 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, 2000.

9 Ward Barrett, ‘World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800’ in Philip D. Tracey (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 224-25.

10 Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700, Berkeley, 1996, pp. 70-82, 114.

11 The Cambridge History of China Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644, Part 2, edited by Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 580-81; von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, pp.146, 161.

12 Ibid., p. 140; Robert B . Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Salt, Cambridge, 1998, p. 128.

Estimates of global silver output and silver flows vary, especially so in the case of trans-Pacific silver flows, moreover, the contribution of China’s silver imports to the fall of the Ming dynasty remains controversial. No matter, the importance of the silver surge for the world economy from the sixteenth century is not disputed. In addition to von Glahn,

Fountain of Fortune, see also John J. TePaske, ‘New World Silver, Castile and the Philippines 1590-1800’ in J. F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, Durham NC, 1983, pp. 425-45; Brian Moloughney and Xia

Weizhong, ‘Silver and the Fall of the Ming: A Reassessment’, Papers on Far Eastern History, 40, 1989, pp. 51-78; Barrett, ‘World Bullion Flows’, passim; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, ‘Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the Early Modern Period’,

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 38:4, 1995, pp. 429-48; André Gudner Frank, Re-ORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, 1998, pp. 143-49, 237-43; Jan de Vries, ‘Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-route Trade, 1497-1795’ in Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez (eds), Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470-1800, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 75-82; William S.Atwell, ‘Another look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635-1644, Journal of World

History, 16:4. 2005, pp. 467-89.

13 On the wakō see Jurgis Elisonas, ‘The Inseparable Trinity: Japan’s Relations with China and Korea’ in John Whitney Hall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan Volume 4: Early Modern Japan, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 249-55.

14 Armando Cortesão (ed.), The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, 1512-1515, 2 vols, London 1944, 1, p. 131.

15 Quoted in von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, p. 120.

16 Ibid., p. 140.

17 See Derek Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, New Haven, 1990, pp. 285-88, 304-7; Coen, Bescheiden, 1, p. 682.

18 J. A. van der Chijs, Geschiedenis der stichting van de Vereenigde O.I. Compagnie, Leiden, 1857, p. 132; Eiichi Kato, ‘Unification and Adaptation, the Early Shogunate and Dutch Trade Policies’ in Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (eds), Companies and

Trade, Leiden, 1981, pp. 207-30, passim.

19 William Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615-19, repr. New Delhi, 1990, p. 373.

20 K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600-1640, repr. New York, 1965, pp. 117-22; idem, The Trading World of Asia and the East India Company 1660-1760, Cambridge, 1978, pp. 2-3, 156-60; Dennis O. Flynn, ‘The Microeconomics of Silver and East-West Trade in the Early Modern Period’ in Wolfram Fischer et al. (eds), The Emergence of a World Economy 1500-1914, 2 vols, Wiesbaden, 1986, 1, pp. 37-60. See also Dennis O Flynn and Arturo Giráldez,

‘Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History, 13:2, 2002, pp. 393-96, and von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, pp. 5-6;Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 191.

21 Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, pp. 61, 127.

22 Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the Early Modern Period’,p. 264; idem, ‘Cycles of Silver’, p. 396; Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, p. 181; Peter C. Purdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, Cambridge MA, 2005, p. 283.

23 Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 161.

24 De Vries, ‘Connecting Europe and Asia’, p. 92; idem, ‘Limits of Globalization’, p. 718.

25 Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan, Berkeley, 1993, p. 148.

26 Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the

Eighteenth Century, Past and Present, 182, 2004, p. 141.

27 Ibid., loc. cit.

28 Cited in ibid., p. 125.

29 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in

Historical Perspective, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 245 n. 139, 256-57.

30 Ibid., pp. 5-37, 115-23.

31J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, Cambridge, 1966, p. 63.

32 Farrington, English Factory, 1, p. 554.

33 For Hideyoshi’s relations with the Philippines see James K. Irikura, ‘ Trade and Diplomacy between the Philippines and Japan, 1585-1623’, unpublished Yale University Ph.D., 1958, chap. 2; Lothar Knauth, Confrontación transpacifica, Mexico, 1972, pp.

121-43; Juan Gil, Hidalgos y samurais: España y Japón en los siglos XVI y XVII, Madrid,18 1991, pp. 32-81; Antonio Cabezas, El Siglo Ibérico de Japón: La presencia Hispano-Portuguesa en Japón (1543-1643), Valladolid, 1995, chap. 4; C. R. Boxer , ‘Portuguese and Spanish Projects for the Conquest of Southeast Asia, 1580-1600, repr. in idem, Portuguese Conquest and Commerce on Southeast Asia 1500-1750, London, 1985, III, p.133.

34 On Ieyasu’s relations with Spain see Naojiro Murakami, ‘Japan’s Early Attempts to Establish Commercial Relations with Mexico’ in H. Morse Stephens and Herbert E.Bolton (eds), The Pacific Ocean in History, New York, 1917, pp. 467-79; Irikura, ‘Trade

and Diplomacy’, chap. 3; Knauth, Confrontación transpacifica, pp. 190-206; Gil,Hidalgos y samurais, chaps. 3-4; Cabezas, El Siglo Ibérico de Japón, pp. 327-79.

35 For an overview of the Ibero-Dutch struggle see Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606-1661, Oxford, 1982. For the ramifications of the struggle in the Philippines and the Spice Islands, see Ruudje Laarhoven and Elizabeth Pino Wittermans, ‘From Blockade to Trade: Early Dutch Relations with Manila, 1600-1750’, Philippine Studies, 33:4, 1985, pp. 485-496; John Villiers, ‘Manila and Maluku: Trade and Warfare in the Eastern Archipelago, 1580-1640’, Philippine Studies, 34:2, 1986, pp.146-61. The characterisation of the VOC’s activities in the first two decades of the seventeenth century as “privateering” (Adam Clulow, ‘Pirating in the Shogun’s Waters: The Dutch East India Company and the Santo Antonio Incident’, Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies, 13, 2006, pp. 66-7) traduces the importance of the VOC, and the powerful interests it represented, in shaping the Dutch state’s policy against Spain, especially during the negotiations over the Twelve Years’ Truce, 1606-1609. See Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 6-9, 14-15, 16-17, 26, 36, 40-41; idem, Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585-1740, Oxford, 1989, pp. 70-73.

36 W. Michael Mathes (ed.), California 1: Documentos para la historia de la demarcación comercial de California 1583-1632, 2 vols, Madrid, 1965, 2, pp. 866-67, 948-49.

37 Derek Massarella, ‘”Ticklish Points”: The East India Company and Japan, 1621’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, third series, 11:1, 2001, p. 46. 19

38 There is now an extensive array of primary and secondary sources on Taiwan in the seventeenth century. On the Dutch, see J. L. Blussé et al. (eds), De dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan, 1629-1662, The Hague, 4 vols, 1986-2000; Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, available at www.gutenberg-e.org. On the Spanish, see José Eugenio Borao Mateo (ed.), Spaniards in Taiwan, 2 vols., Taipei, 2001; idem, Spanish Experience in Taiwan 1626-1642: The Baroque Ending of a Renaissance, Hong Kong, 2009. For the English East India Company’s interlude on the island from 1670-1685, see Derek Massarella, ‘Chinese, Tartars and “Thea” or a Tale of Two Companies: The English East India Company and Taiwan in the late Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, third series, 3:3, 1993, pp. 395-426; Chang Hsiu-Jung et al. (eds), The English Factory in Taiwan 1670-1685, Taipei, 1995.

39 Jan De Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 394, 395.

40 Massarella, ‘Chinese, Tartars and “Thea”‘, passim.

41 Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 119; de Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy,

pp. 431-33.

42 Foster (ed.), Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, pp. 303-4.

43 Massarella, ‘Chinese, Tartars and “Thea”‘, pp. 424-25.