ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with North east Asia and the opposite shore of the Pacific in North west America, which will be referred to as the North Pacific Area. Most research about inter-Asian competition for the world market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has concentrated on Japan, Korea, China and the area to the south of these countries. The chapter discusses the appearance of traders from Great Britain and the United States in the North Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century and the impact this had on Japan. Although the British fur trade with China expanded rapidly, it did last long, because the British East India Company banned British maritime traders from selling Chinese goods at home. Merchants in the British fur trade between the North Pacific and China knew of the Japanese fur trade and thought of Japan as a market for their fur.
