ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between the Asian economy and the West and investigates inter-Asian competition in the silk industry. Japan survived intense inter-Asian competition from India and China in the world silk market from the middle of the nineteenth century, and, in the twentieth century, captured the raw silk market of the United States, the largest consumer of raw silk. In the world silk market, the leading suppliers of Asian raw silk changed during the nineteenth century, the first half of the twentieth century. The 1890s to the 1920s saw a split in the world silk market in which Chinese raw silk dominated in Europe, Japanese raw silk in the United States. The world silk market in these years, can be roughly divided into two types of market. So, the factors behind Japan's victory in the inter-Asian competition for raw silk were the popularization of Japanese society and the relative similarity between the Japanese market and the US market.
