Geography in motion
Distance and Division in East Asia
China alone may have accounted
for one-third of global manu-
facturing. This was not to last.
A hundred years later, a new emperor
destroyed Zheng He’s navigation logs
and slashed the navy to one-tenth its
size, believing that the costs of for-
eign expeditions outweighed the ben-
efi ts. China entered centuries of self-
imposed isolation, broken in infamous
and damaging fashion by the British
during the Opium Wars of the nine-
teenth century.
East Asia’s age of isolationism
China was not alone in trying to shut
out the rest of the world. In Japan,
Tokugawa Iemitsu issued the “Closed
Country Edict of 1635” and the “Exclu-
sion of the Portuguese, 1639,” effectively
shutting off Japan to external infl uences
for the next two centuries. The edicts
not only prevented foreign entry into
Japan but also banned Japanese from
going abroad. The dislike of all things
Western extended to technology. In
an extraordinary attempt to preserve
its culture and social hierarchy, Japan
gradually abolished the gun in favor of
the more elegant and symbolic samurai
sword.
These extreme examples show the
vast division between countries in East
Asia, especially after the seventeenth
century. Scholars do not agree fully on
the economic effects of such division.
Some have argued that reductions in
living standards were signifi cant during
the Qing and Tokugawa periods. Others
believe that it is more apt to character-
ize these societies as having stagnant
rather than declining economies. In any
event, wage levels in Japan and China at
the start of the nineteenth century were
well below those in London or Amster-
dam, even in real terms, perhaps by as
much as 50 percent.1 Adam Smith had
already recognized this: “The difference
between the money price of labour in
China and Europe is still greater than
that between the money price of sub-
sistence; because the real recompence
of labour is higher in Europe than in
China.”2
Smith was correct. Even