After Tamerlane (21 page)

Like China, Japan experienced a remarkable period of political consolidation and economic growth in the seventeenth and early eigh
teenth century. The shogunate, or regency, was made hereditary in the Tokugawa clan. The imperial court, reduced to symbolic importance, remained in the old capital at Kyoto, where the shoguns also maintained a splendid palace for their periodic visits. The key to political stability was the supremacy that the Tokugawa exerted over the clans and clan domains into which Japan was divided, and over the
daimyo
, or nobles, who ruled them. Military dominance was supplemented by the notorious system of
sankin kotai
, which required the
daimyo
to leave their wives and children at the shogunal capital at Edo and to reside there themselves in alternate years. While in Edo,
daimyo
were obliged to attend the shogun's court twice a month, and to perform administrative duties in and around the city. At the same time the hereditary warrior class, the samurai, were gathered in domain castle towns, like Himeji or Nagoya, or attended Edo as retainers of the resident
daimyo
. By degrees, they were transformed into a gentry service class, dependent on their clan stipends and increasingly attracted to the gentlemanly ideals propounded by Confucianism, whose vision of the social order was a useful buttress to their novel status.

Internal peace was accompanied by rapid growth in the population, which increased from 12 million in 1600 to some 31 million by 1721 – a figure half as large again as that of France, Western Europe's demographic giant.
¹⁰⁵
There was considerable urbanization, and Edo

(
c
.1 million), Kyoto (350000) and Osaka (360,000) were all major cities by world standards. In 1700 Edo was twice the size of London.
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The area under cultivation doubled between 1600 and 1720.
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There was a large and sophisticated base of artisan production in textiles, metalwork, ceramics and publishing.
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Regional economic specialization increased, promoting internal trade. Large commercial entrepreneurs managed this internal trade, which centred on Osaka. This was the ‘kitchen of Japan', with its great rice market, fertile hinterland and proximity to Kyoto – still the cultural capital and a focus of manufacture especially in silk. By contrast with Western Europe, early modern Japan was still a ‘wooden world', perhaps because in an earthquake zone this allowed cheap and rapid rebuilding. Its cities were vast agglomerations of low-rise wooden structures. But visiting Europeans were in no doubt that Japan was an advanced and wealthy civilization, and they were eager to trade with it.
¹⁰⁹

As we have seen, Japan had played a dynamic role in the expansion of East and South East Asian trade between
c
. 1540 and
c
.1640, which coincided with the arrival of Europeans in the region. Japanese traders and buccaneers (
wako
) exploited the new commercial opportunities of a triangular trade between Japan, China and South East Asia, while Japan's huge silver boom helped fuel the commercial expansion and pay for foreign imports.
¹¹⁰
By some estimates, Japan was producing one-third of the world's silver by 1600
¹¹¹
– one reason why Europeans were so eager to trade there. Japan's south-western ports, especially Nagasaki, grew rapidly, sprouting ‘Chinatowns' where Chinese artisans and businessmen settled
¹¹²
– some 200in Nagasaki alone by 1618.
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Famously, however, the attitude of the
bakufu
(the Tokugawa government in Edo) towards this expanding foreign trade was deeply ambivalent. The regime was new, and its control over distant clan domains was likely to be compromised by unregulated external contacts. Catholicism, in particular, became identified with rebellion and subversion, and was vigorously persecuted. In the 1630s and '40s Chinese and Dutch trade (the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted) was restricted to Nagasaki and the artificial island of Deshima built in its harbour. The prolonged turmoil in China and the closure of its ports to legitimate trade after 1661 helped stifle East Asia's foreign trade. But when it revived, after 1685, the
bakufu
became increasingly alarmed by the outflow of Japanese silver and banned its export in 1688. The control system at Nagasaki was reinforced after 1698 to monitor the flow of commerce and intelligence even more closely.
¹¹⁴

Japanese ‘seclusion' was motivated in part by the ‘bullionist' fears familiar enough to European governments, and in part by unease over relations with China, the regional superpower, whose East Asian ‘world system' was a denial of Japan's independence. Isolationism was the solution by default of the problem of Sino-Japanese relations, and may have been calculated to dissuade the Ch'ing rulers from an invasion of the kind only narrowly defeated four centuries earlier. But seclusion was not complete. Chinese ideas and culture exerted a powerful attraction, and were deliberately fostered by the Tokugawa regime. China was the great model of a settled, stable, imperial state. Chinese literature and art set the tone in polite society: mastery of
the Chinese language and the Chinese style of painting were highly prized.
¹¹⁵
Great efforts were made to adapt Confucian teaching to Japanese conditions. Thus Nagasaki was not so much a closed door as a narrow gateway and a listening post where the
bakufu
collected information from visiting ships (whose captains were required to write ‘news reports' for transmission to Edo) and through which it imported books. ‘Dutch knowledge' percolated slowly among the samurai, teachers and savants.

The regime of political seclusion did not mean economic stagnation. Japanese economic growth after 1600 was driven by a remarkable double revolution. Firstly, the political system created a large new urban economy as
daimyo
and samurai settled in castle towns. The most spectacular case was Edo itself. The
sankin kotai
rules brought to Edo hundreds of
daimyo
and their families and vast retinues of samurai.
¹¹⁶
By 1700 half of Edo's 1 million people were samurai retainers living in the great clan compounds that made up nearly three-quarters of the city area. Together the
daimyo
and the samurai formed a huge concentration of elite consumption for the services and manufactures of the urban merchants, artisans and day-labourers. Their purchasing power came from their domain revenues, sometimes rendered in kind and kept at the great storehouses along the Edo waterside, and sometimes remitted in cash once the rice tithe had been sold in the Osaka market, from where much of Edo's food came. This system was a powerful stimulus to internal trade and banking, and promoted a large integrated economy producing foodstuffs and manufactures for a central market. In turn, the demand of elite urban consumers for the revenues they needed was a spur to productivity in the rural domains. And the counterpart to
daimyo
residence in Edo was their regular journeying to and from their provincial homes.
Daimyo
processions, sometimes up to 2,000 strong, encouraged the growth of inns and a regular network of routes by land and sea.

Secondly, this pattern of elite consumption was not dependent (as it became in Europe) upon foreign trade. The Japanese were able to practise a policy of mercantilist self-sufficiency with remarkable success once foreign trade had become less rewarding. Unlike England, for example, the Japanese had their own supply of silver, and had no need of trade to obtain the basis of their currency – the problem
that obsessed economists in early modern Europe. The Japanese also responded in a highly original way to the domestic demand for luxuries and new foodstuffs. Korean ceramics had long enjoyed prestige in Japan. After Hideyoshi's invasion in the 1590s, Korean artisans were brought to Japan and a native industry was established. Japan's wide range of climatic conditions allowed the indigenization of new cash crops: cotton, silk, tobacco and sugar. Silk and cotton were manufactured in Kyoto and Osaka, and self-sufficiency was achieved in sugar. Fishing too became of much greater importance in the seventeenth century. In all these ways the Japanese successfully exploited an exceptionally rich and diverse natural environment and developed a wealthy mercantile economy comparable with Europe's but without the costs and risks of colonialism. Even after 1720, when economic growth was checked by resource depletion and the lack of new land, and population ceased to grow, an ‘industrious revolution' of more intensive agriculture, promoted in part by the state (through experimental farms and the import of Chinese botany), helped to preserve the economic achievements of the previous century and safeguard the political and social unification that the Tokugawa shogunate had engineered.
¹¹⁷

The economic dynamism of early modern Japan and its subsequent turn towards ‘mercantilist isolation' were both in large measure a consequence of Japan's position in the East Asian world order. The recovery of Chinese power and the reinvigoration of China's old diplomatic tradition offered little scope for Japanese influence on the continental mainland, which was, anyway, comparatively remote (by European standards). Fear of a dominant continental civilization was coupled with strong attraction to its cultural products and social values: it was a difficult relationship to manage successfully. Once Japan began to run short of silver and the domestication of foreign produce became practicable, there was good reason to look for economic and social stability in an insular commercial policy rather than run the extreme risks of oceanic expansion. Ironically, the Japanese imposed restraints on the import of foreign textiles at the same time as the British, but with much more success. The real threat to Japanese stability and independence lay less in the penetration of foreign ideas or technology – both of which could be gradually assimilated and
nativized – than in some environmental or external shock. Famine, which, after a century, had returned in the 1720s, might wreck the economic system or enforce drastic change. Equally, renewed instability in the East Asian world order, which had sucked in outsiders in the sixteenth century, might upset the carefully guarded integrity of the Japanese world. But of this ominous prospect there was in the 1750s little sign. On the contrary, with the Ch'ing conquest of the further reaches of Inner Asia in 1759–60, the advantages that Japan reaped from its exceptional geostrategic location seemed greater than ever.

In the later early modern period (1620s–1740s) the Islamic world was far more exposed to influence and competition from Europe than were the states and civilizations of East Asia. At innumerable points between South East Asia and the Atlantic coast of Africa, European soldiers, sailors, traders, missionaries and diplomats confronted their Muslim counterparts, since both the Islamic realm and Europe had expanded with the growth of long-distance trade between the fifteenth century and the seventeenth. As we saw in the previous chapter, the period celebrated in European history as the ‘Age of Discovery' had also seen the consolidation of the three great Muslim empires: the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. It saw a rapid and powerful wave of Islamization in South East Asia after 1500, with the strengthening of that region's commercial ties with India and the Middle East and the attractiveness of Islam as the religion of trading states and more extended forms of kingship.
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In West Africa, another vast sphere of Islamic influence since the eleventh century, the rise of the Songhay empire in the middle Niger after 1468, the reinforcement of Islam further east in the Hausa states like Katsina and Kano
¹¹⁹
and the consolidation of Bornu under Mai Idris Alawma (r.
c
.1571–
c
.1603)
¹²⁰
asserted the continuing dynamism of religious, cultural and political ideas flowing south and west from the Islamic heartlands.

By contrast, the later early modern period (after
c
.1620) is often portrayed as an era of stagnation and impending decline in the Islamic
empires and Islamic culture, whose introversion and conservatism are compared unfavourably with the innovative currents in European thought.
¹²¹
It is easy to race to the glib conclusion that European societies had adopted the scientific mentality needed for material progress, leaving their Muslim neighbours stuck in the religious mud. In fact the importance of the scientist, as opposed to the humble craftsman, in Europe's technological and commercial life was marginal, at best, before the later eighteenth century.
¹²²
Nevertheless, there were some signs in the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century that the great Islamic states and the Islamic culture they supported had lost the dynamism of the previous phase. Commercial depression and the Dutch conquest of the main Islamic states in South East Asia (Makassar, Banten and Mataram) after 1660 were major setbacks. In the West African Sahel the fall of Songhay in 1591 (ironically, at the hands of Moroccan invaders) inaugurated a long period of political disintegration in the middle Niger unfavourable to the deepening of Islamic influences.
¹²³
And each of the three great Muslim empires experienced powerful centrifugal tendencies whose effect was to weaken its internal solidarity against external attack. But, for all that, there was little sign before the mid eighteenth century that these changes amounted to an irreversible shift in the relative strength of Islamic and European societies, rather than a more subtle adjustment in the global equilibrium.

At first sight, the history of the Ottoman Empire offers ample proof that Islamic states and culture were condemned to inexorable retreat and progressive decline. Between 1683 (when they failed dramatically to capture Vienna) and 1739 the Ottomans suffered major losses of territory, throwing into reverse the expansionist drive that had carried them into the heart of Europe in the sixteenth century. At the Peace of Carlowitz in 1699, after sixteen years of war, the sultan was forced to surrender Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburg emperor. Renewed conflict between the two empires between 1716 and 1718 cost the Ottomans dearly at the Peace of Passarowitz in 1718. Western Wallachia, the Banat (or ‘border region') of Temesvar (modern Timişoara in Romania) and Serbia were handed over to Vienna, together with the great frontier fortress of Belgrade, commanding the approaches to the lower Danube valley. The military
elan and superior fighting technique that had carried the janissaries to so many victories in the previous century seemed much less effective against Habsburg armies trained in new methods of drill and led by generals like Montecuccoli or Prince Eugene of Savoy. Worse still, perhaps, from the Ottomans' point of view, after 1700 they faced not one enemy but two in the Balkans–Black Sea region. Faced with the threat of both Habsburg and Romanov expansion, the Ottomans lost their privileged status as an early modern ‘superpower' in South East Europe, enjoying splendid isolation from the web of intra-European diplomacy. By 1740 the price of Ottoman survival was much fuller participation in the European states system, with all the costs, risks and compromises that this was bound to entail.
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