Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process. This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. Within the confines of these conflicts, the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company in Japan as something more than just a commercial organization, The Company and the Shogun presents new perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting relationships to develop between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise.

A ground-breaking collection of essays that explores the place of the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia and the nature of their interactions with Asian rulers, officials, merchants, soldiers and brokers.

In the early modern period, relations between the Netherlands and Japan were founded on trade. The Dutch United East India Company operated in Japan for over 100 years, from 1609 to the early 18th century. The Dutch-Japanese relationship - built sometimes on understanding and at other times on resentment - is recorded in great detail in the trade-related archives of the period. This book closely examines these documents to reveal the changing market conditions of the main commodities exported by the Dutch from Japan at the time: silver, koban (gold), copper, and camphor. This analysis of both Dutch and Japanese perspectives on the trade market forms an intricate picture of the cultural, political, and economic context of trade between the Netherlands and Japan in the early modern period. *** "...many useful tables and charts in this book, which economic historians of Japan and Asian trade networks will be able to use in the future." - Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 39:2, 2013

In this definitive study of the intra-Asian trade in Japanese copper trade by the Dutch East India Company, the author argues that the trade in this commodity reaped high profits. Despite the huge imports of British copper by the English East India Company during the eighteenth century, the Dutch Company successfully continued to sell Japanese copper in South Asia at higher prices. Compared to the capital-intensive development of British mines in the age of the Industrial Revolution, the copper production in Tokugawa Japan was characterized by a labour-intensive 'revolution' which also made a big impact on the local economy.

For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 to 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian Archipelago. Merchant in Asia is the first study to pay attention to the full breadth and width of the VOC commercial activities in Asia. It looks at the company from the peak of its fame until its final decline at the end of the eighteenth century. The study focuses on the main trade goods - spices, Indian textiles, Chinese tea and Javanese coffee - and their specific by-products. Els Jacobs has analyzed in detail the VOC trade in fifteen of the most important commodities that together made up 85% of the total turnover. This innovative study is based on extensive research of the VOC archives and many other Dutch sources, as well as a detailed quantitative analysis of the VOC bookkeeping records. In the study the author sketches in vivid detail how the merchants of the VOC sold, bought, and even supervised the production of tropical products and how they dealt with Asian suppliers and consumers. In addition, she looks at the range of problems the merchants encountered in the maritime trade from Yemen and Persia in the West to China and Japan in the East, including India, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Indonesian Archipelago.