The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan by Adam Clulow (review)

The Company and the Shogun is an engaging, tightly knit, and timely study of the origins of the Dutch East India Company’s experience in Tokugawa Japan. The book’s author, Adam Clulow, draws heavily from Dutch sources that have been published in recent decades and builds on the work of revisionist (economic) historians of European expansion in the early modern period. Clulow is committed to a view of the East India Company (or VOC by its Dutch acronym) as a “hybrid organization” (p. 12), in equal parts a political and a commercial enterprise. His overall aim is to reinterpret the long-lasting relationship between the Japanese state and the VOC as a Western overseas venture. Taking a non-Eurocentric perspective, he argues against the stereotype “of the European arriving on distant shores armed with technological advantages and an absolute belief in his own superiority” (p. 4).

How does Clulow build his case? Eschewing a more comprehensive approach, he concentrates on three areas of analysis, dissecting the company’s diplomatic standing in Japan, its exercise of violence in the seas surrounding the archipelago, and its claims of sovereignty vis-à-vis the Japanese authorities. Clulow shows that the Dutch were forced to compromise and adapt themselves to ever more stringent Japanese demands in all three areas.

The diplomatic status accorded the VOC in Japan was gradually and deliberately downgraded by the Tokugawa shogunate, until in the 1630s the Dutch acquiesced in a subordinate position as foreign quasi-vassals to Japan’s military government. In 1609, when VOC envoys first presented themselves to Japan’s paramount leader, the retired shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, they came as royal ambassadors. Their credentials were based on a fictive kingship attributed to Prince Maurits, who, as stadhouder, was actually not a monarch but more like a supreme field commander in the Dutch Republic. Though superficially successful in securing what seemed, to Dutch eyes at least, to be unrestricted access to the Japanese market, this kingly expedient came back to haunt the VOC almost 20 years later.

In 1627 the Japanese flatly refused to accredit the next official Dutch embassy, which had been sent by the Dutch governor-general in Batavia on his own authority, no longer relying on a distant royal figure in the Netherlands. What had happened to “the king of Holland,” the Japanese wondered. After grilling interrogation, the Japanese authorities rejected the Dutch request for an audience with the shogun and sent the unfortunate ambassador packing, his mission unaccomplished. The Dutch fell victim to their own inconsistent and self-contradictory logic—a deadly mistake in East Asian diplomacy even today—presenting first a kinglike figure and then a nonsovereign viceroy to the Japanese as their fountainhead of diplomatic legitimacy. It was interim governor-general Jacques Specx in Batavia, an old Japan hand, who came up with the solution to this thorny dilemma: the Dutch offered to play a subordinate role in the Tokugawa political order as fictive vassals of the shogunate, thereby dropping any pretense of external representation.

With regard to the use of violence by the VOC in the seas around Japan, Clulow paints much the same picture. Moving in phases, the Tokugawa shogunate forced the VOC to refrain from the use of force against rivals on the trade routes to Japan. The VOC accepted this Japanese dictate for two reasons. First, the VOC understood full well that it was not much of a military threat to the Tokugawa. Second, all its claims that its privateering, in particular when aimed against Portuguese merchantmen, was a legitimate form of warfare fell on deaf ears in Japan. In fact, the Japanese authorities did not consider the careful legal distinction made by VOC officials between piracy and privateering to be even remotely convincing. The primary concern of the Japanese was well-regulated and safe trade lanes. They sought to expand their...