Yokohama and the Silk Trade

How Eastern Japan Became the Primary Economic Region of Japan, 18431893

By (author) Yasuhiro Makimura

Publication date:

15 June 2017

Length of book:

276 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498555593

This study provides a broad political and economic examination of the impact of the silk trade on nineteenth-century Japan. It analyzes the economic role of Japan’s eastern interior region and that of the port of Yokohama. It argues that the economic development in this period laid the foundations for Japan’s prewar industrial development in the late nineteenth century and was largely responsible for the integration of Japan into the global economy.

Chapter 1: The Early Modern Japanese Economy
Chapter 2: The Failure of the Tempō Reforms and the Opening of Yokohama
Chapter 3: The First Merchant of Yokohama
Chapter 4: Bakumatsu Japan’s Trade and Yokohama’s Place in that Trade
Chapter 5: Yokohama and its Hinterland
Chapter 6: The Producers of Eastern Japan

Makimura’s attention to individual actors and the choices they faced is an effective tool for exploring the many contingencies that went into making the Japanese silk trade successful. . . .