This volume undertakes the important task of envisioning a regional history of Asia based on its unique internal characteristics, going beyond the usual West/non-West dichotomy. The 'regional trade zone of modern Asia' was debated in the 1980s. Since then, Japanese historians of the socioeconomic history of Asia have explored how the traditional trade relations that had developed over the centuries in Asia responded to the so-called Western impacts in the mid-nineteenth century, including the opening of ports and tariff reduction under free trade regimes and the advance in transportation technology. Against this academic background, the four chapters in this volume examine how overseas Chinese, some of the key actors in regional and local trade, dealt with their Western counterparts, and how Asian commodities penetrated other parts of the world through the newly created web of global commerce. The book reviews discuss theoretical issues to explore various connections among and comparisons of the economies in the region. This volume provides readers with critical insights into the Asian region in the past and present by investigating the long-term trajectory of its linkages to the global economy.
Editor
Tomoko Shiroyama is a professor in the Graduate School of Economics, the University of Tokyo. Professor Shiroyama received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Tokyo and was awarded a Ph.D. by Harvard University (History, 1999). Her book China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929-1937 (Harvard Asia Center, 2008) has been translated into Chinese and Japanese and was awarded the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in 2012. Her research is on the banking and monetary system of modern China, the finance of Chinese businesses, and the trans-regional movement of goods, people, and institutions in Asia. Her most recent book, co-edited by Chi Cheung Choi and Takashi Oishi, Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia: Networking Businesses and Formation of Regional Economy (Brill, forthcoming), examines the internal dynamics of Chinese and Indian merchant houses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explores their relationships with the Western powers in the region. Shiroyama is currently leading a project supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science called 'Hydrosphere and Socioeconomics in Modern Asia: Exploring a New Regional History Using a Database and Spatial Analysis', which combines meteorological history, hydrological history and socioeconomic history.
