著者

チャウドゥリ K. N. 川勝 平太

出版者

社会経済史学会

雑誌

社会経済史学 (ISSN:00380113)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.51, no.1, pp.1-16, 1985

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This paper argues that the transition from pre-modern trade to post-Industrial Revolution trade in Asia and indeed in the world generally incorporated a fundamental change in its causation. Pre-modern trade was essentially derived from socially-determined demand arising out of cultural habits and interpretations, but of course, the force of demand operated through market forces and relative prices. Nineteenth-century international trade, on the other hand, was founded on the supply and the production side of the world economy. The fundamental changes in the system of economic production based on the application of machinery and the capitalist organisation made movements of industrial raw materials, food stuffs, and even manufactured goods appear as induced effects of the needs of producers to keep production going. In the pre-modern period, the thinking of merchants and others involved in the business of distant trade, was overwhelmingly influenced by demand factors. This is far removed from the present-day situation in which international trade is primarily a function of the relative distribution of technological endowments. In the earlier period, the technology of production had stabilised itself over many centuries and was treated as if it was a constant. The force of change and the opportunity for accumulating wealth came mainly from shifts in demand and an improvement in the institutional arrangements of economic exchange which lowered costs. There is little disagreement among historians that Asia's inter-regional trade underwent a profound change between 1800 and 1900. The transformation touched both the direction and the composision of goods exchanged. The payments mechanism itself gave rise to induced changes and brought into being the famous trian gular commercial relations between India, China, and Britain, which developed into a true multilateral systems of trade and payments mechanism during the second half of the nineteenth century. Imperialism as an economic force fused together with its political manifestations to form the most powerful historical phenomenon of the time.