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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It is often thought that the Europeans in the 17th c. were so superior with their naval power that by using violence they could set the whole world to their hand and impose their will around the globe. This may have been true of, for example, South America in the century before that, but the European experience in Asia was dramatically different. In Asia the Europeans found old and well-established cultures (India, S.E. Asia, China, Japan) which had their own legal systems and ways of doing things.

[Dutch trade-post Dejima in Nagasaki]

This book focuses on the story of the Dutch East Asia Company (VOC, a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state) and its relationship with the Tokugawa shogunate. Over time, there were various clashes over diplomacy, sovereignty and violence - the Dutch attempts to use violence in waters ruled by Japan were systematically blocked. The author focuses on a handful of flashpoints where both came into conflict. In each such encounter, the Dutch had to retreat, abandon their claims and remake themselves - from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from defenders of colonial sovereignty to loyal subjects of the shogun. The Dutch were entirely encapsulated into the Japanese legal system and ended up as formal subordinates of the Tokugawa state. They had to assume an inferior position in the feudal hierarchy of Japan and were forced to behave according to Japanese laws and rules (the most normal thing of the world, we would say today, but in the colonial discourse this was seen differently).

There is however one black page in Dutch history in Japan where the VOC is somewhat exculpated by Clulow's revisionist (and undoubtedly correct) vision: the 1637 Shimabara Rebellion, when the protestant Dutch sent a ship to use its firepower to batter the walls of a sea-side castle where 40,000 Christian (catholic) rebels were desperately defending themselves from government troops (the castle fell after the Dutch had left - their canons were not very effective, apparently- , after which the rebels were exterminated by the shogunate). This assistance is often presented as an act of base mercantile duplicity ("the Dutch just wanted to trade, no matter at what moral cost"), but in Clulow's new perspective this act now rather appears as the fulfillment of their oath as subordinates of the shogun (as a sort of "Dutch samurai"). In other words: in the Japanese system of which they had been forced to become part, they simply could not refuse.

A fascinating book, thanks to its new and extremely interesting perspective on the unexpected form European expansion did take.




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