ABSTRACT
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were crucial eras for the formation of the modern world economic system. While Andre Gunder Frank comes to the conclusion that the Asian decline began around 1750, much recent research has provided evidence that Asia continued to enjoy considerable economic development in the eighteenth century. Akira Hayami, for example, argues the case for a Japanese labour-intensive industrious revolution, a revolution in the method of production, which compared with the capital-intensive industrial revolution of the West. Japanese records list the annual amounts of copper produced in early modern Japan. Production reached a peak in the late seventeenth century with 90,000 piculs in 1668 and 89,000 piculs in 1700. Besides the VOC, Japanese copper was exported in Chinese junks from Nagasaki and by Japanese ships via the island of Tsushima. The ultimate market for Japanese copper was the world in general, but the aforementioned traders had particular markets to supply.
