China, East Asia and the Global Economy

Regional and Historical Perspectives

Takeshi Hamashita, Mark Selden, Linda Grove, Mark Selden, Linda Grove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134040285
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Takeshi Hamashita, arguably Asia's premier historian of the longue durée, has been instrumental in opening a new field of inquiry in Chinese, East Asian and world historical research. Engaging modernization, Marxist and world system approaches, his wide-ranging redefinition of the evolving relationships between the East Asia regional system and the world economy from the sixteenth century to the present has sent ripples throughout Asian and international scholarship.

His research has led him to reconceptualize the position of China first in the context of an East Asian regional order and subsequently within the framework of a wider Euro-American-Asian trade and financial order that was long gestating within, and indeed contributing to the shape of, the world market.

This book presents a selection of essays from Takeshi Hamashita's oeuvre on Asian trade to introduce this important historian's work to the English speaking reader. It examines the many critical issues surrounding China and East Asia's incorporation to the world economy, including:

• Maritime perspectives on China, Asia and the world economy
• Intra-Asian trade
• Chinese state finance and the tributary trade system
• Banking and finance
• Maritime customs.

1 Editors’ Introduction*

New Perspectives on China, East Asia, and the Global Economy

Takeshi Hamashita, arguably Asia’s premier historian of the longue durée, has been instrumental in opening a new field of inquiry in Chinese, East Asian, and world historical research. The stones that he has cast in the pond of historical interpretation have sent ripples throughout Japanese, Chinese, and international scholarship. Central to his approach has been the attempt to redefine the evolving relationships between the East Asia regional system and the world economy from the sixteenth century to the present. His research has led him to reconceptualize the position of China first in the context of an East Asian regional order and subsequently within the framework of a wider Euro-American-Asian trade and financial order that was long gestating within, and indeed contributing to the shape of, the world market.

As a graduate student at Tokyo University in the early 1970s, Hamashita joined a group of younger scholars who were beginning to question the dominant paradigms in writing about Chinese and East Asian history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Their own teachers had been part of the postwar generation of Japanese historians who had challenged theories dominant in the prewar period emphasizing the stagnation of the Chinese economy and society. Reflecting on the terrible devastation that the war had brought to all of Asia, and most notably to China and Japan, the postwar generation was convinced that historical interpretations of a stagnant China and Asia had played a role in justifying Japanese aggression in China and throughout Asia and the Pacific. In overturning the theories of a long-stagnant Asia, most of the postwar researchers had applied Marxist analytical schemes to the study of such themes as rural handicraft industries, land ownership and land relations, popular rebellions, taxation and institutional reform, and social classes, especially the gentry.¹ Their work had uncovered a Chinese economy and society in the Ming and Qing periods that was far from stagnant. Their careful reading of Chinese local histories and other sources led them to overturn the image of Ming-Qing stagnation in favor of one that highlighted the development of distinctive new economic and social relations in the countryside. It was also a society full of tensions, which frequently led to popular revolt. While Hamashita and his generation found much to admire in the work of their teachers, postwar developments in Asia suggested that new approaches were needed. The search for solutions beyond the Marxist framework grew out of questions related to developments in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia. On the Chinese side, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s had shaken the faith of many who had originally seen socialism as an alternative model for economic growth—one that promised not only economic expansion but also equality and social justice. And for some, it was one that carried an aura of historical inevitability. At the same time, the rapid growth of the Japanese economy, and the beginnings of similar developments in other Asian countries, suggested that the dependency theories which had argued that it would be impossible for late developing states to free themselves from subordinate status in the world capitalist economy were flawed.²

Hamashita’s re-reading of Asian economic history began with a critique of the dominant approaches in postwar Japan and in international scholarship. Scholarly discourse had long been shaped by two major approaches: John K. Fairbank and his students and colleagues had developed a school of interpretation that focused on the “Western impact and Asian responses” in nineteenth-and twentieth-century East Asia. Scholars working in that tradition had used diplomatic records and the records of the Maritime Customs service to chart the changes in China and East Asia as a result of the aggressive expansion of Western trade and diplomacy in Asia, and to examine the economic, political, and intellectual impacts of Western ideas and institutions in Asia and the Pacific. In this view, the primary agency for change in China and Asia lay with the dynamics set in motion by the Euro-American powers in the age of imperialism and after, linking studies of a supposedly stagnant Asia to the modernization theories that were a major theme among scholars working in the fields of economic and social development.

Hamashita and his colleagues also began to question the views of postwar Japanese scholars who had focused on the feudal nature of Chinese society in the Ming and Qing and the internal collapse of that feudal system in the post-Opium War era. Hamashita and his generation were questioning some of the fundamental presuppositions of several generations of Chinese and Japanese historians, who had struggled from the 1920s onward to fit Asian history into Marxist frameworks.³

Their questioning of Marxist interpretations of a “feudal China” began more than a decade before the collapse of socialism. The challenge to Marxist analytical categories had begun with questions about the sharp break that was usually assumed to exist between “feudal” and “modern” societies. Examining China’s interaction—first through trade—with the rest of Asia from the sixteenth century on, they identified more continuities in economy and society than dramatic breaks associated with the shock of the “Western impact.” Like their teachers, they saw development in the Ming-Qing economy. But where the earlier generation had sought to explain why China had not produced a European-style capitalist revolution, analyzing the so-called“sprouts of capitalism” in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in order to grasp what had prevented them from developing a full-blown capitalist economy, Hamashita turned to an analysis of the indigenous system of tribute trade, the role of silver in creating a China-centered Asian trading sphere.

Hamashita’s work thus broke sharply both with Marxist categories and with the standard modernization story that highlighted a one-dimensional and one-directional understanding of China’s, and East Asia’s, “incorporation” into the capitalist world economy. In particular he rejected views that the process started from a relatively “backward” and stagnant starting point and that attributed exclusive agency to the Western powers. Paying equal attention to historic patterns of trade and tribute in East Asia, he began to explore the interface of Western and Asian trade and finance, not only in the epoch of Chinese and East Asian strength in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but also during its multifaceted decline and transformation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hamashita was among the first to document the fact that the heart of the Asian economic zone historically, and the key to its linkage with the world economy as early as the sixteenth century, was silver exchange. While European and American scholarship on East Asia long focused on commodity trade (tea, silk, ceramics, and opium), Hamashita delved deeply into the nature of silver flows as characteristic initially of the Asian trading world, and subsequently as a key to understanding global flows including Europe and the Americas in deep interaction with Asia. Indeed, the large-scale flow of silver from the Americas to China beginning in the sixteenth century linked the major world regions. Where international scholarship closely attended to the outflow of silver from China at the time of the Opium War, Hamashita’s research showed the centrality of silver in China’s and Asia’s economies from the sixteenth century and even earlier, while highlighting the critical role that silver played in linking Asian and Euro-American economies as well as transforming the domestic economy of China. Stated differently, the silver-lined story that Hamashita tells begins not with the multiple disasters associated with the drainage of silver to pay for opium or with the defeat in the Opium War that led to China’s forced opening on terms dictated by the Western powers, and the associated loss of sovereignty associated with the Treaty Ports and extraterritoriality, but with the long epoch of Chinese trading predominance resulting in massive silver flows into China from Asia, Europe, and the Americas in exchange for silk, tea, porcelain, and other manufactures. Silver provides a thread that ties China, Asia, and the world economy through diverse perspectives developed through multiple research projects spanning five centuries, all of them informed in one fashion or another by Hamashita’s research. These include:

• Maritime perspectives on China, Asia, and the world economy. In contrast to the long-dominant statecentric and land-centered China scholarship, Hamashita’s work highlights maritime China and maritime Asia, with commerce and finance at the center and silver as the medium of trade and finance from the sixteenth century forward.
• The structure of intra-Asian trade networks. Beyond the tributary system and the centrality of silver is a spatial vision centered less on national economies and state policies and more on open ports and their hinterlands, one that draws attention to maritime intercourse and the periphery, and that calls into question the statecentric parameters that have long dominated scholarship. It is an approach that requires new spatial understanding of the relationship between land and sea, and between coastal and inland regions and their interconnections. It is also one that anticipates current scholarship by Saskia Sassen and others highlighting global city networks emerging in the long twentieth century.⁴ Moreover, despite its maritime orientation, it also anticipates recent scholarship by Peter Perdue, Evelyn Rawski, Pamela Crossley, Mark Elliott, and others reconceptualizing China–Inner Asia geopolitical and economic structures in terms of a multinational Chinese Empire and its rivals.⁵
• Chinese state finance and the tributary trade system of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Again, silver is shown to be the primary medium of exchange both internal to China as well as regionally and globally, with major items in both official and private trade including rice, silk, marine products, porcelain, tea, and spices. Through the study of changing silver–copper ratios, Hamashita examines financial patterns central both to state finance and the economics and welfare of the Chinese and Asian populations.
• Banking and finance as vehicles for exploring not only China’s trade but also migration and remittances involving Asia and the world economy. A direct extension of changing trade patterns in the last half of the nineteenth century was the sustained migration of Chinese to Southeast Asia, the Americas and elsewhere, and with it, the remittance of silver and new banking networks linking the coastal communities of South China and migrant populations overseas. Remittances were critical not only to the families of migrants. They also provided foundations for the creation of Chinese banking networks in China and internationally. In this way, Hamashita extends his range from the flow of goods to the flow of silver to the movements of people and the return flow of goods and silver that are products of their migration from China to Asia, the Americas, and beyond. He also shows the continued expansive character of China in Asia at a time of government collapse and disintegration.
• The Maritime Customs system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is the story of a hybrid institutional structure that framed economic-financial and political relations between China and the Powers in the era of Western predominance. The research highlights the resources and the institutional accommodations as well as the initiatives that enabled China to resist colonization while forced to accommodate to Western power and reach.⁶

One characteristic feature of Hamashita’s œuvre is his emphasis on the roles played by China and Asia in longue durée perspective in shaping the parameters of the world economy. This is all the more significant because of the tendency in the reappraisals of imperialism beginning with S. B. Saul, J. Gallagher, R. Robinson, and D. C. M. Platt, also evident in the work of Mōri Kenzō, to treat Asia in a negative or exclusively reactive fashion.⁷

Hamashita’s work was stimulated by and in turn stimulated the work of a number of other Japanese scholars of his generation who were working on related problems. While Hamashita’s starting point was China and its involvement in Asian trade, many of his colleagues were specialists in Japanese history. Sugihara Kaoru, who was a graduate student in economics at Tokyo University at the same time Hamashita was pursuing graduate studies in Chinese history and who has subsequently taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), Osaka University, and Kyoto University, had begun to look at intra-Asian trade as a way to explain the rapid growth of the Japanese economy in the prewar period.⁸ Several others specializing in Japanese economic history—including Sugiyama Shinya, who would go on to a post at Keio University, and Kawakatsu Heita, who is now at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto—used the records of foreign trading companies to explore late nineteenth-century Asian markets.⁹ The work of Sugihara, Sugiyama, and Kawakatsu would lead to quite different formulations. However, all shared Hamashita’s view of the importance of intra-Asian trading networks that predated the arrival of Western trading firms. While Sugihara, Sugiyama and Kawakatsu focused on the trade in specific commodities, Tashiro Kazui had begun a meticulous study of the Japanese-Korean trade through Tsushima that had played a major role in the circulation of silver during the Edo period.¹⁰ This flourishing of Japanese scholarship on tribute and trade was part of a wider effort to relocate China and Japan within the context of global history.¹¹ Beginning in the 1970s, an increasing number of research projects sought to locate Japan within the context of Asian and global history.

Japanese research was influential in shaping new challenges in Western scholarship, as seen in the findings of researchers including R. Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz, Andre Gunder Frank, Gary Hamilton, Timothy Brook, Francesca Bray, Tony Reid, Geoffrey Wade, Li Tana, Nola Cooke, and Giovanni Arrighi. These historians have sought the origins of Asian and particularly Chinese economic and financial strength in the pre-nineteenth-century political economy of the tributary trade system that periodically brought order, peace, and economic interchange to the region and enabled it to deal from strength in forging links with the Western and global economy from the sixteenth century.¹² In these and other instances, important new directions were in part the product of Hamashita’s influence, and in many cases grew out of collaborative research both in the archives and in joint research projects. For example, Hamashita’s interest in the question of remittances by Chinese merchants and workers led him to develop close working relations with scholars in South China and Southeast Asia who shared similar concerns, and his work on the Chinese merchants and bankers in Korea led to collaboration with Korean scholars, while his work on intra-Asian trade and the implications for Chinese history led him to work with many scholars in America and Europe who were interested in the new field of global history. Hamashita’s interests have by no means been limited to China’s and Asia’s external relations. They extend, rather, from domestic Chinese financial and trading institutions, such as native banks, guilds, and regional and local markets and income pooling schemes to the Asian and global interplay of political, financial, and economic relationships. A central concern has been to show how regional and global forces interacted with economic institutions and practices in China and Asia, and how such contacts both influenced the regional and global economies and transformed Chinese economy and society.

Hamashita’s work highlights the role Asia and China played in the early development of world capitalism—a role charted primarily through the study of trade and silver flows—that is among the most important challenges to Eurocentric scholarship. It also anticipates the wave of regional-global scholarship since the 1980s that finds in the pre-nineteenth-century order some of the roots of Asia’s economic surge of the late twentieth century.

Hamashita’s choice of finance as a primary subject of inquiry was a response to his Tokyo University thesis, which examined the establishment of the first cotton spinning mill by Li Hongzhang in Shanghai and the subsequent Self-Strengthening Movement of the years 1861 to 1895, a study that extended through to the 1920s. He moved beyond the study of the modern cotton industry not only because he saw the conceptual limitations of trying to explain the whole economic structure through a single commodity or a single element of capital, but also because he recognized the dynamic of the many different strands of Chinese textile production outside the modern sector.

The first banking project he undertook, beginning in the early 1980s, centered on the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Joining the Hong Kong-based project, which was directed by Frank King, Hamashita secured access to the archive, which was closed to other researchers at that time. This led from study of the Japanese silver yen and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank to an examination of overseas remittances in which banks played a pivotal role. Here he came to the realization that for all the power exercised by Western colonizers at the commanding heights, in economic and financial terms, colonialism in Asia was, in important senses, a surface phenomenon. In China and throughout most of the colonized areas of East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was Chinese mercantile and financial interests that penetrated to the grassroots in both cities and countryside, and which provided Asia-wide shipping, trade, and financial linkages spanning the region. It was Chinese financiers who organized the local economy, who arranged the transport of Chinese laborers overseas, and who handled the transmission of remittances back to China. This understanding of the long twentieth century drew on research on Malacca remittances conducted in the early 1980s and subsequent study of remittances to Amoy and Guangdong.

Soon he was zeroing in on the understanding of the Chinese economy and finance through a systematic study of the Chinese overseas, linking China’s various peripheries with the domestic economy and finance. These studies included Taiwan and Korea, the latter through examination of Japan–Korea–Shanghai trade that continued to flourish beneath the radar of the grand narrative of imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike most research on overseas Chinese business networks that relied on local materials, Hamashita mined a wide variety of sources, including government and diplomatic archives in China, Hong Kong, the United States, and Japan, large public collections such as the Morrison holding...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1. Editors’ introduction: new perspectives on China, East Asia, and the global economy
• 2. The tribute trade system and modern Asia
• 3. Despotism and decentralization in Chinese governance: taxation, tribute, and emigration
• 4. Silver in regional economies and the world economy: East Asia in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
• 5. The Ryukyu maritime network from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries: China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia
• 6. Maritime Asia and treaty port networks in the Era of Negotiation: tribute and treaties, 1800–1900
• 7. Foreign trade finance in China: silver, opium, and world market incorporation, 1820s to 1850s
• 8. China and Hong Kong in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• 9. Overseas Chinese financial networks: Korea, China, and Japan in the late nineteenth century
• Notes
• Index