The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan by Adam Clulow, and: Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan by Noell Wilson (review)

These two studies reshape our understanding of how the Tokugawa state managed foreign threats and conflicts. Wilson’s focus is on the defense of Nagasaki, in particular how the shogunate and key domains shared the costs and responsibilities for coastal defense. Her broad argument is that the defense of Nagasaki involved “structural ironies” within the Tokugawa system (p. 9). Rather than assert direct authority over Nagasaki’s defense, the shogunate entrusted it to the domains of Saga and Fukuoka, an arrangement Wilson terms the “Nagasaki system.” That failure to maintain a Weberian “monopoly of violence” contributed to the ultimate downfall of the regime centuries later. The shogunate’s loss of central control in the 1860s was “the latest stage in the dilution of the shogunate’s control of violence that had begun in the 1640s in newly garrisoned Nagasaki” (p. 218). Wilson’s metanarrative is thus one of slow decline: structural flaws in the Tokugawa state system prefigured its collapse in the face of nineteenth-century imperialism.

Clulow engages a similar topic, but with an opposite historiographic agenda. His focus is on the early 1600s and, rather than emphasizing Tokugawa weakness, he highlights Tokugawa strength and the relative weakness of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) and its representatives. Clulow’s approach fits squarely within the new “Great Divergence” paradigm, which argues that the “rise of the West” to supremacy over East Asia occurred only during the nineteenth century. The VOC, Clulow argues, had great aspirations for trade with Japan, but superior Japanese force compelled the company to accede to Tokugawa demands. In order to maintain relations with the Tokugawa, the VOC became, in essence, a Tokugawa vassal, deferring to Japanese hegemony rather than extending Dutch power. Clulow connects this argument with the broader history of the VOC. During the 1600s, the VOC was able to impose trading terms on Indonesian states, such as Mataram, Banten, and Makassar. But it struggled with more powerful states, such as Mughal India and Safavid Persia. In the case of China, the Dutch were expelled from their base on Taiwan by Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功, the Ming-loyalist pirate and leader of a “de facto maritime state” (p. 258). The Tokugawa shogunate fits within this array of Asian powers that faced down Western ambition. Thus, rather than treat the Tokugawa order as an incipient failure, Clulow treats the defeat of the Dutch as the first of two clashes between international orders. During the 1600s the Tokugawa forced the Dutch to comply with Japanese rules, but during the late 1800s Japan was compelled to adopt European norms of international relations.

In both thesis and tone, these works offer starkly different views of the Tokugawa regime. For Wilson, inherent structural flaws in the Tokugawa settlement prefigured the collapse of the Tokugawa regime in the 1860s. The seeds of disaster were sown when the Tokugawa shogunate entrusted the defense of Nagasaki to its vassals, rather than asserting direct control. She notes, for example, “although the structural ironies of this arrangement did not surface on a politically momentous scale until the 1850s, they pervaded the execution of coastal defense duties in subtle ways that gained increasing significance across time” (p. 9). That overall perspective on the Tokugawa settlement reflects the work of Wilson’s thesis adviser, Harold Bolitho. His Treasures among Men, for example, evaluates the role of the fudai daimyo (譜代大名) looking backwards from the 1860s, when many fudai offered only feckless...