ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Anglo-Japanese relations during the 1930s, focusing on the problem of international rivalry between the cotton industries of Britain and Japan in the Asian market. Japan was able to take advantage of its proximity to South and Southeast Asian markets, including those in the British and Dutch colonies, to compete successfully with European goods. The authors claim that the increase in exports of Japanese cotton textiles in the first half of the 1930s to the European colonies in Asia made the European powers intensifies their protectionist policies, thus isolating Japan from the world economy. Japanese historians argue that Japan's economic isolation from the world economy in the first half of the 1930s turned into political aggression in China after 1937. But it can be argued that in the case of the Dutch East Indies, where the modern cotton industry was smaller than in British India, the colonial government recognised that continuing to import cheap Japanese goods.
