2 - Asia

Summary

The economic activity of Europe in the Far East (excluding India) in the eighteenth century was mainly concentrated in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where the European nations had established their trading centres. Japan had withdrawn herself into almost complete seclusion under the Tokugawa Shogans since the fourth decade of the preceding century and was to remain thus isolated until the appearance of Commodore Perry's squadron in 1853. Meanwhile her one eye on the external world was the settlement of Deshima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, not more than 300 paces at its greatest extent, on which a few Dutch merchants lived a life of abject indignity, and which was the only channel of foreign trade. Therefore in this chapter it is in Canton, Batavia, Manila and their environs that our interest chiefly lies. One fact, at least, is common to these diverse areas of economic activity, and that is the independence of the natives of European manufactures and their indifference thereto at this period in their history.