Commentaries

An earlier generation of economic historians saw the great expansion in production and trade that took place in Asia from the middle of the nineteenth century in terms of a response to the intrusion of the west. It was western demands for Asian commodities that drove the massive growth in primary production and trade: it was the mighty expansion of industrial production in the west that increasingly cast Asia as an important market for manufactures. The agents of that expansion, moreover, were western, the great merchants and trading firms whose names – Swires, Guthrie, Jardine, Broustead, Harrisons and Crosfield – form a roll call of heroic endeavor and entrepreneurial achievement. ¹ Modern scholarship, in contrast, now acknowledges the important role of Asian merchants and trading concerns – the remarkably vital Chinese, Indian, Japanese commercial networks – in the transformation of the Asian economies from the middle of the nineteenth century.