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Port Polities in Maritime East Asia in the 16th-17th Centuries

Dans le cadre du séminaire de François Gipouloux  «Aux origines de la mondialisation : histoire économique comparée Asie Europe, 1500-2000», vonglahnfacultypic  Richard von Glahn, Professeur à l’ University of California, Berkeley, fera une présentation intitulée «Port Polities in Maritime East Asia in the 16th-17th Centuries».

The political and economic history of early modern East Asia (16th-19th centuries) invariably has been framed in terms of the development of and interaction among agrarian states (Ming and Qing China, Chosun Korea, and Tokugawa Japan).  During this period the Chinese imperial model exerted a profound effect on state formation and political economy throughout the region.  The Tokugawa shoguns sought to carve out their own “small empire” by extending their dominion over Korea (at least rhetorically, after the failure of Hideyoshi’s invasions in the 1590s), the Ryukyu kingdom, and Ezo (Ainu-populated Hokkaido).  The Nguyen dynasty also consciously imitated the Chinese imperial model in constructing a unified Vietnamese state ruled by the “Great Viet” emperor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Given the trend toward territorial consolidation and the formation of imperial states, it is not surprisingly that historians have paid scant attention to polities that did not conform to this pattern, notably the port polities situated at the interstices of East Asia’s maritime frontiers.
The port polities that I will discuss here—the Ryukyu kingdom in the Okinawa archipelago, the Zheng clan’s thalassocracy in coastal China, and the Dang Trong regime centered at Hoi An on the central coast of Vietnam—emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries as commercial entrepôts occupying key niches in the maritime trading world of East Asia.  Often seen as a distinctively Southeast Asian phenomenon, the “port polity” also was a prominent feature of maritime East Asia.  Before the unification of Japan in the late 16th century, a number of Japanese ports—for example, Hakata, Sakai, and Bungo Funai—flourished not only as centers of overseas maritime trade but also as the capitals of independent daimyo polities and homes to multinational merchant communities.  Outposts of European maritime empires such as Macau and Manila also shared many characteristics of port polities, notably their transnational merchant communities and their multi-faceted integration into the broader East Asian maritime network. 
In each of the three cases discussed here, the port polity achieved not only commercial success but also political independence thanks to the crucial position it occupied in the East Asian maritime trading network.  However, this trade network was highly dynamic and readily reconfigured itself in response to shifting economic and political forces.  In this paper I will analyze the transformative impact of the globalized system of commodity exchange on maritime East Asia in the mid-16th century, the shift from Chinese bronze coin to Japanese and New World silver as the main commodity of East Asian maritime trade, the reorganization of monetary circulation within maritime East Asia, and the varying effects of these changes on the economic and political fortunes of the three port polities.

Date

Mardi 19 mai 2015 11h-13h

Lieu

Bâtiment Le France, 190 avenue de France Salle Elisabeth Allès (681, 6e étage noyau B)


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Jacqueline Nivard (15 mai 2015). Port Polities in Maritime East Asia in the 16th-17th Centuries. Carnets du Centre Chine (CNRS/EHESS). Consulté le 15 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mf4s


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