Tremml, Birgit

English

Comparativ (E-Journal)

10 | Buchbesprechungenture of international trade. The authors are noted experts in their topic areas, and the book begins handsomely with Ian Nish’s article and concludes with Akira Iriye’s fi-nal comments! Naturally, a compilation is always characterised by a certain amount of disunity, but the fresh and interesting viewpoints of the articles largely make up for this. Nevertheless, the perspective of globalisation and global history mentioned in Akira Iriye’s final comments could have been brought forth even more strongly in the articles. In my opinion, that way even more could have been extracted from the Anglo-Japanese relations. For example, by more broadly examining the mutual im-ages of the British and the Japanese and their development during the period in question, it would have been possible to discuss more and on a more general level about relationships between cultures and civilisations in the riptide of differing in-terests. Likewise, through global history the region’s other European actors, such as the Netherlands and France, would have been brought forth better, albeit in prin-ciple the articles concentrate on Anglo-Japanese relations.Takeshi Hamashita: China, East Asia and the Global Economy. Regional and Historical Perspectives, edited by Linda Grove and Mark Selden (Asia’s Transformation / Critical Asian Scholarship), London: Routledge, 2008, 224 S. Rezensiert von Birgit Tremml, Wien This volume, a collection of essays, intro-duces the work of the Japanese historian Takeshi Hamashita on East Asia’s role in world history to an international audience. His characteristic longue-durée-approach to bridge the gap between early modern developments and contemporary history based on dense data generated from a complex body of archival sources prevails throughout the book. In his path-breaking oeuvre, the historical process of the period from roughly c. 1500 to c. 1900 holds centre stage, thus becomes the framework for his analytical theses emphasizing the role of the East Asian regional system in the world economy. Similar to the Califor-nia School, silver exchange is seen as the element linking China to the rest of the globe. In line with that he advocates a new spatial understanding centered on the Middle Kingdom world system and the commercial role of tributary trade. In re-cent years the author’s leitmotiv to study East Asia from the sea (“umi kara mita ajia”) has become a well-established para-digm of Asian scholarship in global history and contributed to new insights in the am-Buchbesprechungen | 107bivalent relationship between local and central respectively official and unofficial levels of interaction.1 In its entirety the book reflects Hamashita’s determination to show that Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) China were not closed economies but embedded in the emerging early modern world economy. Hence, it overturns Marxist theories as well as popular narratives of an anti-maritime history that would have forced a long-stag-nant Asia to in the end adjust to Western capitalism. According to Hamashita the rest of the world had to adapt to China. Voids that arose from dismissing older ap-proaches were filled with new concepts: Features of an emerging market economy, such as open ports and merchant networks that led to the emergence of financial cen-ters were attributed to peripheral areas of the tributary system. Reviewing a book like this is challenging due to the huge differences between the rather loosely linked chapters. The eight articles vary from light essay to scientific analysis. Moreover, one deals with articles that were – except for one – originally published in Japanese. The translations are of excellent quality not having lost any of the crucial implications of the complex Japanese scholarship, although the group of translators surprisingly did not include any professional historians. One notable value of the edition is the extensive list of tables and illustrations the author used to illustrate his thoughts. Although, some of them are cartographically slightly out-dat-ed and others are generalizing too much, e.g. map 4.1. that creates a too linear view on the silver flows in Asia, readers will ben-efit from the graphic support.Edited by two experts in Japanese history, Tokyo-based Linda Grove, professor of History at Sophia University and Mark Selden, Professor Emeritus and Senior Re-search Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University and co-editor of a volume edited by Hamashita and the late Giovanni Arrighi in 20032, the volume begins with an overview of Hamashita‘s scholarly accomplishments such as his in-strumental role in relocating China and Japan in global economic history (chapter 1). In chapter 2 on “the tribute trade system and modern Asia” Hamashita explains why a regional approach is necessary. Arguing that the limits of common geographical categories impede our understanding of a Greater South China Sea, the author re-visits the Sinocentric world order under the Ming and Qing, pointing out the im-portance of “multilateral and multidimen-sional trade” (p. 19) for the emergence of one global world based on the dynamics of the tally trade that involved loyal states, as well as European trading nations. Dis-cussing the control-aspect of the system, he anticipates that this by no means im-peded the development of “mutual trade” not only because tribute was managed as commercial transactions between a sell-ing and a purchasing party based on the silver standard, but also because even in settings were values were attributed to gifts, the play of market forces was of great importance. In addition, the emergence of private maritime merchants who operated outside the system brought new impetus to the lucrative border trade as one branch of the tributary system. Against the back-ground of early modern transformation processes in Asia, he argues that particu-10 | Buchbesprechungenlarly close tributary states such as Japan or Vietnam imitated the system by enforcing their own subordinate tributary states. This is certainly a valuable insight into the far-reaching dimensions of Chinese cosmology however there is a tendency to jump to anachronistic conclusions. Only to mention one: His view on the impact of the Sino-centric tribute trade system on modernization processes in Japan – whose economy to my understanding developed under rather different circumstances than that of her neighboring countries – stands in sharp contrast to other research in that field.3In chapter 3 (“Despotism and decentral-ization in Chinese governance: taxation, tribute and emigration”) the center-pe-riphery relations are emphasized, while foreign trade is analyzed from the point of view of financial and tax institutions and overseas labor migration. Tributary trade relations are perceived as an external ad-ministrative order. What I missed here was a consideration of the famous Hokkien merchants in Southeast Asian port cities in the early modern period whose role in coastal China’s integration into maritime trade has often been pointed out in recent years.4Chapter 4 examines the circulation of silver in East Asia up to the nineteenth century based on the premise that a world silver market was established around 1600. The author argues that silver became the backbone of European expansion in Asia. He highlights the entanglement of silver flows with gold and copper within the East Asian economies and traces the history of silver as regional currency.Chapter 5 that chronologically goes some-what back in time highlights the Ryukyu Kingdom of present-day Okinawa as an active maritime trading nation that served as important supplier for Ming China, a topic that has been largely neglected in world history. This relatively recent article reveals the extensive economic network of the Pacific islands until 1609 when it came under Japanese control. Hamashita shows how Ryukyu merchants served as middlemen between Southeast Asian trad-ing hubs and China thanks to multidi-mensional maritime connections. While mentioning that the Ryukyu system lost importance due to increasing political in-fluence from China and Japan, the reasons of the decline are not examined sufficient-ly. By and large, this section is striking for several positive and negative reasons: deal-ing beyond any doubt with a fascinating topic and presenting intriguing new ideas on mercantilist aspects of the tributary trade, it seems well backed by interesting primary source material. However, much to the reader’s regret, it lacks concise notes on the sources used. As becomes clear from the title of the next chapter “Maritime Asia and treaty port networks in the Era of Negotiation: trib-ute and treaties, 1800–1900”, with this article we reach a new level of complexity in diplomatic relations that culminated in what has often been labeled unequal trea-ties in Asian historiography. This survey of Chinese treaty ports illuminates the cru-cial turn in China’s diplomatic relations to bilateral agreements for the first time in its history. The five major treaty ports, Can-ton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai all benefited from their history as impor-tant port cities in the frontier trade of the tally system. Thus their success is regarded as a continuation of the traditional system. Buchbesprechungen | 10We learn how China’s historically domi-nant role shaped Western treaties with for-mer tributary states and how Qing China aimed at imitating Western models of opening treaty ports in Korea. The last three chapters are best described as a financial history of the Chinese macro-region beginning with an analysis of the relationship between silver and opium, before elaborating on the role of Hong Kong for the Chinese economy and fi-nally making some revealing comments on the banking systems of the late-nine-teenth centuries. All three surveys show how European overseas communities were connected with, or even dependent on, East Asian financial centers in the late nineteenth century. In the last chapter the author argues that it was Chinese banks that exerted an increasing influence on the economies of China’s smaller East Asian neighbors Korea and Japan. It is probably no coincidence that this last essay once again picks up the initial idea of a “Chi-nese economy at the centre” and bridges the gap between China as historical centre to later economic developments in which it controlled the entire region. Having acknowledged the indisputable analytical strength and the huge number of thought-provoking ideas of these essays, a few words should be said about short-comings. My first critique concerns the editors: What I found disturbing is that in most cases it is not obvious where and when the essays have been originally pub-lished and that the book is not fully anno-tated. In Chapter 5, for instance, the read-er learns about 59 records on Ryukyu in early modern Spanish documents (p. 80) but no clear reference is given specifying the type of source material or its location. Some chapters do not have any notes at all. More transparency would give researchers around the globe the chance to actively engage in deepening our understanding of the region and to provide answers to the big questions raised by Hamashita.Notes:1 Masashi Haneda (ed.), Asian Port Cities 1600-1800. Local and Foreign Cultural Interactions, Singapore 2008.2 Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, Mark Selden (eds.), The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, London 2003.3 See among others the renowned work of Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan, Stanford 1984.4 Fundamental research has been carried out in this field by Wang Gungwu.Niall Ferguson / Charles S. Maier / Erez Manela / Daniel J.  Sargent: The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective,  Cambridge: Belknap, 2010, 448 S.Rezensiert von Tobias Rupprecht, FlorenzDie Historiographien haben sich auf die 1970er und 80er Jahre gestürzt. Unter deutschen Zeit- und Sozialhistorikern ge-schieht das weiter aus traditionell natio-nalgeschichtlicher Perspektive – wenn auch mittlerweile meist mit einem pflicht-schuldigen Verweis auf transnationale Zu-sammenhänge.1 Eine Gruppe illustrer Harvard-Historiker dagegen versucht in vorliegendem Band mit insgesamt 23 Bei-trägen den ganz großen Wurf eines globa-

Takeshi Hamashita: China, East Asia and the Global Economy. Regional and Historical Perspectives, edited by Linda Grove and Mark Selden (Asia’s Transformation / Critical Asian Scholarship), London:: Routledge, 2008, 224 S.

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Takeshi Hamashita: China, East Asia and the Global Economy. Regional and Historical Perspectives, edited by Linda Grove and Mark Selden (Asia’s Transformation / Critical Asian Scholarship), London:: Routledge, 2008, 224 S.

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