The Nanban and Shuinsen Trade in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Japan
The primary momentum for the nanban trade was the need for importing military matériel in the Age of Civil Wars. Japanese history merged with the great trends of world history, probably leading to many social changes. In this period, Japan and Southeast A
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Background to the Nanban Trade Traditionally, the word nanban (南蛮 lit. ‘southern barbarian’) meant vaguely the uncivilized peoples belonging to the south of China. In sixteenth-century Japan, this word probably signified the general area in the Indochina peninsula of modern Thailand and Cambodia. When the Japanese first encountered people from the Iberian Peninsula, they called them ‘nanban-jin’ (南蛮人 southern barbarians) because they had arrived along with the people traditionally so called from Indochina and because they brought goods associated with those areas. In 1498, the Portuguese were the first European power to round the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost point of Africa, entering the Indian Ocean with the guidance of Islamic sailors who were thoroughly familiar with the sea lanes, to successfully join in the Indian Ocean trade. They established fortresses at important points in order to protect that trade. While maintaining a delicate balance with local ruling powers, they
M. Oka (*) University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s) 2018 M. Perez Garcia and L. de Sousa (eds.), Global History and New Polycentric Approaches, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4053-5_8
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developed a trade network structured around points and lines. This was the so-called Estado Português da Índia, or Portuguese India.1 The Portuguese Age of Discovery has been commonly conceived of as an absolute maritime dominance of the Indian Ocean as far as the seas around Indochina, but that is simply an impression. In reality, the fortresses were mostly nothing more than corners in major Asian ports, built with the permission of the local authorities. In other words, these were not colonies at all. The soldiers sent from Portugal to defend these fortresses would become merchants soon after their military service ended and were scattered among the ports throughout Asia engaging in trade. Thus, with almost no relation to the interests of the Kingdom of Portugal, many Portuguese involved in trading operations came to live in the Coromandel region of the Bay of Bengal on the eastern coast of India, the trading ports of Pegu, Arakan, Cambodia and Siam on the continental portion of Southeast Asia, or the many port cities of the islands of Southeast Asia. In later years many Portuguese also lived in Batavia where the Dutch East India Company had its base, functioning as intermediaries with local peoples in Dutch trading activities (Souza 1986: 129–145).
2 The Dispersion of Portuguese Merchants The recent spread of Chinese and Indian overseas settlers has been called a diaspora. Diaspora is a word derived from Greek that was originally used to signify the scattering of the Jews by the Roman Empire after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the colonization of Judea. In the study of history and sociology in modern society, this word is used to indicate the phenomenon of the movement of a particular people to another region due to some circumstances, their forming a co
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