China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives

Breaking with both Japanese Marxist approaches and modernization theory to understand East Asia and its evolving relationship with the European world economy, Professor Hamashita argues that long before Europeans arrived in Asian waters in the sixteenth century, there was an East Asian regional system centred on China's tribute trade system that structured economic and political relations among the states of East and Southeast Asia into the early twentieth century. Chapter 3 links Chinese emigration patterns to the tribute trade system, chapter 4 examines the economic history of silver in East Asia, chapter 5 illuminates the surprisingly extensive trade network of the Ryukyu kingdom from the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, chapter 6 reveals the extensive international negotiations among East Asian states in the nineteenth century, chapter 7 delves into the extraordinarily complex economics of the silver and opium trade in the nineteendi century, chapter 8 highlights the economic role that the British colony of Hong Kong played up to the early twentiedi century, and chapter 9 demonstrates the growing influence of Chinese native banks in late-nineteenth-century trade with Korea and Japan.