Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750: The Foundations of the Modern Asian ‘Economic Miracle’?

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the interpretation of the economic history of Asia has undergone a revolution to match the startling ‘take off’ of the performance of the Asian economies. Prior to this, historical debate about the development and performance of the Asian economies tended to reflect the priorities and assumptions of Western historians and economists. Based on the notion that industrialisation, as experienced in Europe and North America, represented the universal development trajectory of all societies, debate tended to focus on the propensity of Asian economies to follow this ‘normal’ path of economic development. Subsequent to Marx in the nineteenth century, the debate about Asian development has concentrated on several perceptions and questions. The first of these concerns the condition of the Asian economies before the era of Western imperialism, and their capacity for economic modernisation through independent capitalist and industrial development. The second question, and logically following on from the first, is that of the effect of Western imperialism on Asian development capabilities. For Marx, the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ — in which despotic systems of government extracted excessive taxes from impoverished peasants and precluded the development of property rights — locked Asian societies into a state of near-permanent stagnation. This was relieved only by Western imperial intervention, which brought with it modernisation by implanting capitalism and industrialisation.