The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan - by Michael Laver (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries.

Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

Review Quotes

Michael Laver collects fascinating stories about the political and economic roles played by the performance of gift exchanges between the Dutch East India Company and the Japanese. All those interested in the history of trade will find this bookboth illuminating, enjoyable, and broadly readable.
Terrance Jackson, Professor of History, Adrian College, Michigan, USA

This study brings together scattered and sometimes inaccessible data to position the shogun's realm firmly within the burgeoning field of diplomatic history and present-giving. It will be of use to historians of international encounter, overseas trade, knowledge transfer, and all those who wonder how cultures seek - and so often fail - to put themselves across when encounter the Other.
Timon Screech, Professor of the History of Art, SOAS, University of London, UK

About the Author

Michael Laver is Department Chair and Associate Professor of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. He is the author of The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony (2011) and Japan's Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century (2008).