Asia in the Growth of World Trade: A Re-interpretation of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’

Abstract

What trends did the volume of world trade follow during the ‘long nineteenth century’, the period from the late eighteenth century until the eve of the First World War, and how did regional shares change? It is not easy to provide an empirical answer to these questions because it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the volume of world trade, encompassing trading activities in all the continents, began to be captured with some degree of accuracy. Available data published by countries in the West, particularly the UK, is biased, reflecting the territorial expansion of Western powers and the resulting changes in the scope of interests and capacities of the information-gathering machinery. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to the history of growth in the trade of nation states, we can only capture a very small portion of the total, as this would mean that we take no account of the activities of Asian merchant networks, which dominated trade in the Indian Ocean and the East Asia Sea,1 the two spheres of regional trade that, along with the trading sphere of the Atlantic, constituted the three largest regional trading spheres centring on the sea during this period. Of course, if we want to extract information on the volume of trade during this age of maritime and river trade by junks and land transportation by draft animals from various statistical and descriptive materials, which were recorded in various ways in political entities around the world, primarily those belonging either to the territories of the Chinese and the Mughal empires or to those areas that the Western powers had turned into colonies or territorial possessions, it is necessary to perform a reconstruction.