The Indian merchants of Kobe and Japan's trade expansion into Southeast Asia before the Asian-Pacific War

Abstract

Studies of modern Asian economic history were hitherto carried out by scholars who took a traditional Eurocentric approach and emphasized economic relations between Asian countries and the West. However, since the early 1990s there have been growing numbers of economic historians who are critical of that approach and who attach greater importance to the role of intra-Asian trade in the economic development of Japan and other Asian countries. In this article I examine Japan's trade expansion into Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular reference to British Malaya. In contrast to trade between Japan and the West, which was mostly in the hands of Western merchants, Japan-Asia trade was controlled mainly by such Asian merchants as overseas Chinese and Indians at least until the First World War. I focus on the Indian merchants of Kobe, who were particularly active in Japan's burgeoning textile trade.