Kaoru Sugihara

Local suppliers of credit in the Third World, 1750-1960

Part 1 Indigenous bankers before the Western impact: urban credit and market economy in Western India c1750-1850, G.D. Sharma and Peter Robb both a borrower and a lender be - from village money-lender to rural banker in proto-industrial Japan, Ronald P. Toby. Part 2 Opportunities and risks under the Western impact: towards a history of indigenous credit markets in Western Africa c1800-1960, Gareth Austin banking, credit and capital in colonial Natal c1850-1910, Robert Morrell et al agricultural credit in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina 1890-1963, Jeremy Adelman. Part 3 Regional suppliers of credit: British colonial policy and agricultural credit in Zanzibar 1890-1963, Chizuko Tominaga Chettiar capital and South-East Asian credit networks in the inter-war period, Rajeswary Brown capital markets, sharecropping and contestability - Singapore Chinese in the inter-war British Malayan estate rubber and pineapple industries, W.G. Huff.

The Economic Motivations behind Japanese Aggression in the late 1930s: Perspectives of Freda Utley and Nawa Toichi

This article discusses how economic motivations behind the Japanese decision to invade North China in the late 1930s were understood by two contemporaries, Freda Utley and Nawa Toichi. During the interwar period, East Asian economies, including those of Japan and China, considerably strengthened mutual economic ties through trade, investment, migration, and the transfer of technological and managerial skills. Although Japan was technologically ahead of other countries, her economic superiority was by no means overwhelming. For example, the development of a modern Chinese cotton industry centred around Shanghai reduced Japanese exports of cotton textiles to China, which resulted in Japanese cotton mills both diversifying into higher-value goods and artificial fibres and investing in China. This also explains Japanese textiles being suddenly sent to South-east Asia and India in large quantities in the 1930s. The development of Manchuria played an important role in the expansion of Japanese heavy industry in terms of market, investment opportunities, and the securing of resources. It also attracted largescale migration from China. Indeed, against a background of world depression and collapse of trade in the 1930s, East Asia stood as a notable exception where the dynamics of regional integration continued to work well. The regions economy and trade was outperforming the rest of the world by a significant margin (see Table 1).1 There is thus no doubt that the Japanese idea of an East Asian co-prosperity sphere could have had good economic grounds if an equal political footing had been assumed. That this was not the case is well-known; Japan con-

British Imperialism, the City of London and Global Industrialization

The concept of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, a term that was coined by P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins to characterize the nature of British capitalism, has been at the centre of scholarly debate for some time. In British Imperialism, first published in two volumes in 1993 (the second edition was published in a single volume in 2001, with foreword and afterword), the authors have attempted to provide a comprehensive analysis of the history of British imperialism. It is based on the reading of a vast amount of secondary literature, covering three centuries and key British colonies and spheres of influence, and deals with a number of major issues on modern British history. Naturally, many empirical and methodological points have been taken up and debated by British and imperial historians since its publication. However, the themes and issues involved are so wide-ranging that there is room for further discussion on possible thematic links with various literatures which neither authors nor critics have so far considered.

Asia in the Growth of World Trade: A Re-interpretation of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’

What trends did the volume of world trade follow during the ‘long nineteenth century’, the period from the late eighteenth century until the eve of the First World War, and how did regional shares change? It is not easy to provide an empirical answer to these questions because it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the volume of world trade, encompassing trading activities in all the continents, began to be captured with some degree of accuracy. Available data published by countries in the West, particularly the UK, is biased, reflecting the territorial expansion of Western powers and the resulting changes in the scope of interests and capacities of the information-gathering machinery. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to the history of growth in the trade of nation states, we can only capture a very small portion of the total, as this would mean that we take no account of the activities of Asian merchant networks, which dominated trade in the Indian Ocean and the East Asia Sea,1 the two spheres of regional trade that, along with the trading sphere of the Atlantic, constituted the three largest regional trading spheres centring on the sea during this period. Of course, if we want to extract information on the volume of trade during this age of maritime and river trade by junks and land transportation by draft animals from various statistical and descriptive materials, which were recorded in various ways in political entities around the world, primarily those belonging either to the territories of the Chinese and the Mughal empires or to those areas that the Western powers had turned into colonies or territorial possessions, it is necessary to perform a reconstruction.

Local Suppliers of Credit in the Third World, 1750-1960: Introduction

This book explores an important but little researched aspect of the emergence of the world economy, and of the history of regional and local economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America; the historical development of sources of credit based in the Third World itself, rather than in the European and North American metropoles of the world economy. The existing literature has noted a variety of activities by moneylenders and local and regional bankers, ranging from exploitation of peasants to investment in manufacturing. There has also been considerable discussion of their interest rates and lending policies, their impact on production and their relationships with governments. But these studies relate to particular kinds of credit suppliers in their respective places and periods. Until now no single volume has addressed the question of their place in the development of the capitalist world economy as a whole.