You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Precious metals played a key role in inter-continental trade between Europe and Asia in the early modern period. An assured supply of these metal was indeed a pre-requisite to the procurement of Asian goods such as spices, textiles and raw silk. Once these metals had been imported into Asia, they were converted into the coinage of the country concerned. The 'bullion for goods' pattern of trade had important implications for the level of output, income, employment and prices in the Asian societies. This collection of essays by Professor Om Prakash explores these issues in relation mainly to the Dutch East India Company. Given the scale of its operations, as well as its unique character as the...
The literature on early-modern monetary history is vast and rich, yet overly Eurocentric. This book takes a global approach. It calls attention to the fact that, for example, Japan and South America were dominant in silver production, while China was the principal end-market; key areas for transshipment included Europe and Africa, India and the Middle East. Europeans were often just middlemen. Other monetized substances - gold, copper and cowries - must also be viewed globally. The interrelated trades in metals and monies are what first linked worldwide markets, and disequilibrium within the silver market in the 16th and 17th centuries was an active cause of this global trade.
This book elucidates the differing interpretations on Japanese mythology by the German philologist and historian Karl Florenz (1865-1939) and the Japanese kokugakusha Iida Takesato (1828-1900) at the end of the 19th century. Iida in his Nihonshoki-tsushaku and Florenz in his Japanische Mythologie approached a comparable endeavor from very different vantage points. It is shown how their distinct cultural formation, their education and upbringing within unlike academic discourses, and their life within a variety of intellectual, social and political milieus formed their different scholarly outlook and methodology in interpreting and commenting on the Nihongi-myths. Comparing both scholars, their work and their mutual relation, we can find a very interesting interaction of cultural and scholarly traditions. Based on translations of both works, this study juxtaposes Iida's 'emic' inner view on Japanese mythology with the 'etic' outside view of Florenz, and at the same time provides the first portrayal of life and work of these two eminent scholars in English.
None
Papers originally presented at a symposium in Bad Homburg, Germany, in April 1993.
On July 29, 1643, ten crew members of the Dutch yacht Breskens were lured ashore at Nambu in northern Japan. Once out of view of their ship, the men were bound and taken to the shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, in Edo, where they remained imprisoned for four months. Later the Japanese government forced the Dutch East India Company representative in Nagasaki to acknowledge that the sailors had in fact been saved from shipwreck and that official recognition of the rescue (i.e., a formal visit from a Dutch ambassador) was in order. Prisoners from Nambu provides a lively, engrossing narrative of this relatively obscure incident, while casting light on the history of the period as a whole. Expertly constructing his tale from primary sources, the author examines relations between the Dutch East India Company and the shogunal government immediately following the promulgation of the "seclusion laws" (sakokurei) and anti-Christian campaigns.
This book focuses on the political and commercial relations between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin from 1637 until the beginning of the eighteenth century. The VOC exported silk and silk piece-goods from Tonkin to Japan. The author focuses on various aspects of the mutual relationship between the VOC and Tonkin, and how this fitted into the larger picture of the intra-Asian trade. The book reveals the vicissitudes in political relations, and the varying trends in the VOC's import (silver and copper) and export (silk, ceramics, musk, and gold). While examining a great deal of detailed archival materials, the author evaluates Dutch influence on Tonkin's feudal society and economy. The book also offers a fascinating sketch of how the Vietnamese trading elite maximized their own profits by dealing with various western tradesmen, including the English and French.
"Making History Matter explores the role history and historians played in imperial Japan’s nation and empire building from the 1890s to the 1930s. As ideological architects of this process, leading historians wrote and rewrote narratives that justified the expanding realm. Learning from their Prussian counterparts, they highlighted their empiricist methodology and their scholarly standpoint, to authenticate their perspective and to distinguish themselves from competing discourses. Simultaneously, historians affirmed imperial myths that helped bolster statist authoritarianism domestically and aggressive expansionism abroad. In so doing, they aligned politically with illiberal national leade...
Written by a team of Japanese and German scholars, this book presents an interpretation of Japanese/German history and international diplomacy. It provides a greater understanding of key aspects of the countries' bilateral relations from the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the parallel defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945. New research is explored on the military as well as ideological interconnections between Japan and Germany in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the First World and the development of bacteriological warfare during the Second World War. In addition, the book's focus on the Second World War significantly re-interprets two familiar axis of Japanese-German relations: the impact of Nazi ideology on Japanese "fascism", and the Axis Alliance. Drawing on German as well as Japanese archival sources, the book presents a revealing examination of a crucial period in the modern history of Western Europe and East Asia. As such it will be of huge interest to those studying the modern history of Japan/Germany, comparative and world history, international relations and political science alike.
This detailed, chronological study investigates the rise of the European fascination with the Chinese language up to 1615. By meticulously investigating a wide range of primary sources, Dinu Luca identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing. Tracing the contours of this tropology, The Chinese Language in European Texts: The Early Period offers close readings of language-related contexts in works by classical authors, medieval travelers, and Renaissance cosmographers, as well as various merchants, wanderers, and missionaries, both notable and lesser-known. What emerges is a clear and comprehensive understanding of early European ideas about the Chinese language and writing system.