This book explains compellingly that, despite common belief, in the early modern period, the intra-East Asian commercial network still functioned sustainably, and within that network, the Sino-Japanese trade can be seen as the most significant part which not only connected the Chinese and Japanese domestic markets but also was linked to the global economy. It is commonly thought that East Asian countries like China and Japan maintained a stance of so-called national isolation during the period from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that diplomatic relations between Qing China and Tokugawa Japan could have not been established for reasons such as guarantees of security; however, every year merchants in junks voyaged to Nagasaki and carried out transactions with Japanese merchants or business agents. How this kind of trade relation was maintained stably without any diplomatic guarantees and in which way the governments of the two sides edged into the trade and accommodated the trade conflicts and institutional frictions are essential but seldom-emphasized topics. This book aims to shed light on these issues and thereby examine the character of the unique trade order in early modern East Asia as well, by analyzing a large quantity of the seldom-used and unpublished Chinese and Japanese primary and secondary sources.

Author Biography

Hao Peng is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Economics, Osaka City University. He was born and brought up in China. After getting his first master's degree in the Graduate School of History, Fudan University, he went to Japan in the autumn of 2005 and continued to study the history of early modern Japan at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo. There, he finished his second master's degree in 2008, and then a doctoral degree in 2012. During the following 4 years, he continued his study at the Historiographical Institute, The University of Tokyo, first as a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and then as a program-specific researcher. He has held his current position since the spring of 2016. His research book based on his doctoral thesis was published in 2015 by The University of Tokyo Press. The title is Kinsei Nisshin Tsusho Kankeishi (the history of the early modern trade relationship between Qing China and Tokugawa Japan). That book earned him the Nikkei Economic Book Culture Award (by the Nikkei Inc. and Japan Center for Economic Research) in 2015. Besides the history of the Nagasaki trade, his study interests cover maritime history, the history of culture exchange, and comparative urbanization.