Three Men in a Boat? How the Suminokura, Caron, and the Zheng Experienced the Regime Changes in East Asia (1600–1670): An Essay in Global Microhistory

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Leonard Blussé
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Regime Changes ◽  
Chinese Entrepreneurs ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Public Lecture

Abstract This article, originally presented as a public lecture at the occasion of the Fukuoka Prize Ceremony in September 2019, approaches from biographical and microhistorical perspectives the careers of three early-modern protagonists, Suminokura Ryōi, François Caron, and Zheng Zhilong, who were all involved in the maritime trade of the Eastern Seas. It shows how these Japanese, Dutch, and Chinese entrepreneurs became entangled with the epochal changes of regime in China and Japan in the first half of the seventeenth century, and concludes with remarks on their agency, loyalty, and legacy.

scholarly journals Antisyphilitic Mercury Drugs in Early Modern China and Japan

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Trambaiolo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Corrosive Sublimate ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Mercury Chloride ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
China And Japan

Abstract Toxic mercury chloride compounds, including preparations and mixtures of corrosive sublimate (HgCl2) and calomel (Hg2Cl2), were widely used in early modern Chinese and Japanese medicine. Some of these drugs had been manufactured in East Asia for more than a thousand years, while others were produced using newer recipes developed in East Asia after the arrival of syphilis or introduced through contact with European medical knowledge. This paper traces the history of the uses and methods of production of sublimated mercury chloride drugs in early modern East Asia, showing how the Chinese doctor Chen Sicheng’s invention of the drug shengshengru (J. seiseinyū) 生生乳 in the seventeenth century exerted a strong influence over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese doctors’ treatment of syphilis. Japanese doctors’ efforts to produce and use seiseinyū provided a foundation of technical knowledge that was important for their later reception of European-style mercury chloride drugs.

The Fundamentally Different Roles of Interpreters in the Ports of Nagasaki and Canton

Itinerario ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisuke Yao
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Dutch Language ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

With the expansion of Western power from the seventeenth century onward, many Asian countries were confronted with difficult political and economic problems in their relations with Europe. In several countries in Asia, in order to suppress Western cultural influences within their own nations, governments often employed foreigners as interpreters for their own diplomacy and trade with Europeans, with some governments even prohibiting their people from learning foreign languages.But, in the case of Japan, interpreters played a crucial role in both the study of the Dutch language and the integration of Western knowledge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seems that early-modern Japanese interpreters were quite different from the interpreters of Western languages in other countries in Asia, as in Nagasaki interpreters of the Dutch language were shogunate-appointed Japanese nationals.Here I will examine and compare several aspects of the Chinese pidgin-English interpreters at Canton and the Japanese Dutch-language interpreters at Nagasaki, in particular their origins, incomes, duties, learning, and businesses. Through this examination I will demonstrate how the so-called Westernisation processes adopted in China and Japan were actually reflected in and represented by the different models of foreign trade at the ports of Canton and Nagasaki.

How and Why the Dutch East India Company Became Competitive in Intra-Asian Trade in East Asia in the 1630s

Itinerario ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
World Economy ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
The World ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Global Operations

Many of the principles we know today about the world economy were first discovered in Early Modern Asia. The Portuguese and the Spanish were the first to extend their sphere of trade to encompass the world. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes and others, all made their way past the Cape of Good Hope seeking their share of the Asian trade. By the middle of the century, one of them became so successful that, aside from being the envy of the others, they set a new standard of efficiency in global operations. It was of course the Dutch.

Some Observations on the “Seventeenth-Century Crisis” in China and Japan

1986 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Atwell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
China And Japan

For more than three decades now, scholars have been debating whether or not a “general crisis” occurred in European social, economic, and political history during the seventeenth century. The debate is far from over, but one of its happy side effects has been that students of seventeenth-century Spain, France, or England now are rarely satisfied to study their chosen countries in total isolation. Indeed, it is generally agreed that many aspects of European history during the early-modern period need to be studied from an international perspective in order to be understood fully.The author maintains that the same is true for early-modern China and Japan. Although they had radically different economic, social, and political systems, the Ming dynasty and Tokugawa shogunate experienced a number of problems during the midseventeenth century that were at once interrelated and strikingly similar to those occurring in other parts of the world at the same time.

Merchants, migrants, missionaries, and globalization in the early-modern Pacific

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Clossey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
Trade Network ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
American Interest ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
China And Japan

In 1571 the founding of Manila made possible regular transpacific trade and thus forged the missing link in the global trade network. American interest in China and Japan soared to new heights. In the next two centuries this attraction fuelled other globalizing exchanges—parallel to the commercial ties—across the Pacific. Thousands crossed the ocean to create the America’s first Asian diaspora communities, and Mexico became Europe’s clearinghouse for information about Asia. The most intense connection was missionary, for churchmen in America worked with one eye relentlessly turned to East Asia and dreamed of the possibility of evangelization, and of its alluring dangers. These exchanges, and the attendant expanding mental horizons, evince enough similarities with modern globalization to warrant incorporation into that concept.

scholarly journals NARRATING JAPAN'S EARLY MODERN SOUTHERN EXPANSION

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
BIRGIT TREMML-WERNER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Pacific

Abstract This article explores how the Japanese translator-historian Murakami Naojirō created an understanding of the Japanese past that established seventeenth-century Japanese actors as equivalents to western European and overseas Chinese merchants. Creating a historical geography of the Southern Seas and the Pacific, Murakami celebrated Japan's expansionism, not only by stressing the seventeenth-century Japanese presence in South-east Asia, but also, more subtly, by identifying the existence of a progressive spirit in the Japanese individuals involved in it. His narrative strategy included implicit comparisons with the European age of expansion, whose protagonists in South-east Asia relied on the networks and services of both Japanese wakō (‘pirates’) and more complex actors such as the red seal merchant Yamada Nagamasa. The article is a case study for Japan's intellectual imperialism of the 1910s–1940s, which closely intertwined popular discourse and academic history.

Research Statement: Portuguese–Dutch Conflicts and the Macao–Nagasaki Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-74
Author(s):  
Dong Shaoxin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
International Relations ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Policy Adjustments

The Macao–Nagasaki connection in the early seventeenth century involved a complex set of interrelationships with regard to trade, mission, cultural intercourse, and other important topics between China, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. The rise to importance of Macao and Nagasaki was the result of the interruption of Sino–Japanese trade relations and the policy adjustments by the governments of China and Japan to bring the Portuguese under their control and administration. One of the main differences between Macao and Nagasaki was that the former remained a Portuguese settlement for centuries, while the latter was an enclave first of the Portuguese and later of the Dutch. This short article, mainly based on secondary sources by C. R. Boxer, Leonard Blussé, and others, is a tentative study of the international relations in East Asia and their changes after the appearance of the Portuguese and the Dutch in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Two important facts make the sixteen-century international relations in East Asia different from the situation before: the appearance of the Portuguese in this area and the deterioration of Sino–Japanese relations.For the first thirty years after the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Guangdong in 1514, encounters between them and the Chinese were rife with misunderstandings and conflicts, because Portugal was not a tributary country of China; the Portuguese were totally new to the Chinese. As the Portuguese could not establish formal commercial relations with China, in order to acquire Chinese goods they sought close relations with Chinese and later Japanese smugglers and pirates. They even engaged in the slave trade, which gave them a very bad name in China.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

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