Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1868–1899 by Catherine L. Phipps (review)

In this pathbreaking work, Catherine Phipps proposes a novel framework for understanding Japan’s globalization at the end of the nineteenth century. Empires on the Waterfront argues that even before Japan recovered its territorial sovereignty in 1899, Japanese engaged in significant international trade outside of the treaty ports of Hakodate, Kobe, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Yokohama and the open cities of Osaka and Tokyo. The book examines the opening of 22 “special” ports before 1899, with particular attention to the Kyushu port of Moji and its integration with the nearby coalfields of Chikuhō. Phipps demonstrates that these ports facilitated the creation of production and export infrastructures linking Japan with other sites in “transmarine Asia” and that they were an integral, and heretofore ignored, factor in Japan’s rapid emergence “from semicolony to formal empire” at the end of the Meiji period (p. 24).

Empires on the Waterfront is essential reading for any specialist on nineteenth-century Japan. Traditionally, historians have emphasized two stages of Japan’s opening—the “unequal” treaties of 1854–58, which forced open five ports and two cities under terms advantageous to the Western powers, and the enforcement of revised and “equal” treaties in 1899. Phipps shows that this narrative overlooks a “much longer trajectory and a much broader geography” (p. 250) of foreign trade. Japanese leaders and enterprises took advantage of the fact that the unequal treaties did not prevent Japan from voluntarily opening other ports to trade, and in ways that allowed them to retain control over the conditions of exchange. Japanese leaders thus engaged in a “cautious liberalization of trade” (p. 65) under the unequal treaties to both earn revenue and spread the economic benefits of foreign trade to hinterlands. The book therefore suggests three intermediary “acts” or “key junctures” of Japan’s opening: the opening of ports for trade with Korea to promote economic integration between the two countries (1876–89), “special ports for export” to promote the export of a limited set of commodities (1889–94), and ports to take advantage of new trading opportunities in Taiwan and with Russia (1893–99).

The work as a whole is divided into three parts, of two chapters each, that emphasize global, national, and local spatial scales. Despite their delineation into separate sections of the book, Phipps has shown the imbrication of the three scales; this research demonstrates in concrete fashion how these local economies and identities developed in relation to national and international contexts. Moji’s opening as a special port for the export of coal in 1899 takes center stage. Standard works on foreign trade in the Meiji era have focused on the silk and tea trades, as well as official efforts to develop an export-oriented textile industry.¹ Phipps shows, however, that the Meiji state also sought to export coal, rice, sulfur, wheat, and wheat flour in order to rectify Japan’s negative balance of trade. Moji port was built with the specific intention of providing export facilities—including markets, stevedores, and a custom house—for coal mined in the Chikuhō region of Fukuoka Prefecture. The port’s remarkable rise “as if from nowhere” (p. 115) makes it an exemplary case to examine the economic and political forces that shaped Japan’s foreign commerce in these decades.

The book is particularly convincing in its geographical analysis. It explains in great detail how the geography of transportation networks was a major factor in the success or failure of individual ports. Phipps also has done the field a major service in diversifying the range of sites for the study of the modernization and globalization in Meiji-era Japan. To that aim, the work decenters Tokyo to show how a host of coastal cities were able to contribute to Japan’s modernization and reshape the “malleable spatial grid” (p. 5) of informal empire in Asia. The delineation of these local-level...