ABSTRACT
Remarkably, at the far eastern end of the Eurasian Silk Road there emerged a fresh variant of merchant capitalism. It occurred in the early seventeenth century in Japan. How much it owed to the global trade initiated and perfected by the European mercantilist powers and how much it owed to purely domestic forces is an interesting question. Suffice it to say that trade and technology transfer between the European powers and Japan blossomed in the sixteenth century. In principle imitation of a powerful new form of commerce was a possibility. In principle, the Japanese might have been attracted to Western institutions because Japanese ideology was relatively close to Western European ideology.
