Get It in Writing (If You Can): Regulating Foreign Communities in Tokugawa Japan

Abstract: This article proposes “capitulations” and “contracts” as a framework for reassessing how the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) regulated foreign merchants. Capitulations are an established subject of study in other contexts, but this work brings the concept to bear on early modern Japan. Comparing documents exchanged with the Chinese, Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish communities in the seventeenth century, we find that Tokugawa capitulations changed in form and content. Initial Tokugawa capitulations to the Dutch and other newly arriving foreign communities provided assurances in the form of written orders carrying the shogun’s personal seal. But in time guarantees of privileges direct from the shogun yielded to the issuance of restrictions that were communicated orally and put to paper (if at all) by lower-ranking officials. Later contracts made with the Dutch East India Company were agreed between local merchants and Company merchants, likely without the involvement of authorities. Together, capitulations—organizing relations between hegemons and merchants, and contracts—organizing trade among merchants, fulfilled many of the functions later assumed by commercial treaties. Using this conceptual framework helps integrate Tokugawa Japan into the broader historiography exploring how early modern regimes engaged with commercial actors straddling multiple polities during intensifying long-distance trade.