The Deshima Diaries 1641 1660

"The present volume of The Deshima Diaries consists of the journals that were kept by the chiefs of the Dutch trading post in Japan during the first two decades of the so called seclusion period (1640-1868). The employees of the Dutch East India Company - since 1640 the only Europeans in Japan - had to give up their relatively free life in the port of Hirado and were forced to move to the tiny island of Deshima in the Bay of Nagasaki. Continually surrounded by Japanese guards, spies, cooks, concubines and interpreters they sought to continue their trading activities with their Japanese hosts. Once a year the chief of the factory and two or three staff members made a court voyage to Edo to pay obeisance to the Shogun. The diaries in this volume describe in detail how the Dutch merchants grappled with the severe restrictions that were imposed on them, but their writings also shed surprising light on social and economic life in Nagasaki and beyond. The present volume of The Deshima Diaries consists of the journals that were kept by the chiefs of the Dutch trading post in Japan during the first two decades of the so called seclusion period (1640-1868). The employees of the Dutch East India Company - since 1640 the only Europeans in Japan - had to give up their relatively free life in the port of Hirado and were forced to move to the tiny island of Deshima in the Bay of Nagasaki. Continually surrounded by Japanese guards, spies, cooks, concubines and interpreters they sought to continue their trading activities with their Japanese hosts. Once a year the chief of the factory and two or three staff members made a court voyage to Edo to pay obeisance to the Shogun. The diaries in this volume describe in detail how the Dutch merchants grappled with the severe restrictions that were imposed on them, but their writings also shed surprising light on social and economic life in Nagasaki and beyond. The present volume of The Deshima Diaries consists of the journals that were kept by the chiefs of the Dutch trading post in Japan during the first two decades of the so called seclusion period (1640-1868). The employees of the Dutch East India Company - since 1640 the only Europeans in Japan - had to give up their relatively free life in the port of Hirado and were forced to move to the tiny island of Deshima in the Bay of Nagasaki. Continually surrounded by Japanese guards, spies, cooks, concubines and interpreters they sought to continue their trading activities with their Japanese hosts. Once a year the chief of the factory and two or three staff members made a court voyage to Edo to pay obeisance to the Shogun. The diaries in this volume describe in detail how the Dutch merchants grappled with the severe restrictions that were imposed on them, but their writings also shed surprising light on social and economic life in Nagasaki and beyond. Contributors are:Willem Remmelink and Wouter Milde"--

The Deshima Diaries provide invaluable daily information on social and economic life in Tokugawa Japan in the early years of the Sakoku period.

The abolition of slavery and similar institutions of servitude was an important global experience of the nineteenth century. Considering how tightly bonded into each local society and economy were these institutions, why and how did people decide to abolish them? This collection of essays examines the ways this globally shared experience appeared and developed. Chapters cover a variety of different settings, from West Africa to East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, with close consideration of the British, French and Dutch colonial contexts, as well as internal developments in Russia and Japan. What part of the abolition decision was due to international pressure, and what part due to local factors? Furthermore, this collection does not solely focus on the moment of formal abolition, but looks hard at the aftermath of abolition, and also at the ways abolition was commemorated and remembered in later years. This book complicates the conventional story that global abilition was essentially a British moralizing effort, “among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations”. Using comparison and connection, this book tells a story of dynamic encounters between local and global contexts, of which the local efforts of British abolition campaigns were a part. Looking at abolitions as a globally shared experience provides an important perspective, not only to the field of slavery and abolition studies, but also the field of global or world history.

Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

Focusing on Formosan agency in the encounter with Dutch colonialism and Chinese encroachment, this book reveals a fascinating picture of Taiwan in the early modern era.

With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.

English translation of the marginalia, or marginal notes, that were added to the text of the Deshima Diaries diaries from the 1670's onwards in order to provide the Dutch chief of Deshima (Dutch East India Company (VOC)) with a quick reference to the notes of his predecessors. This volume covers the marginalia from the 1700-1740 diaries.