Place: Zoom/University of Vienna, Kolingasse 14-16, R. 4.25
Time: 14:30-16:00 CET
All are welcome. Please sign up here [zoom link] to register for the meeting and receive the Zoom link. A draft paper will be circulated approximately one week before the colloquium.
This paper reassesses the frictions and opportunities defining Tokugawa Japan's relationship to the Spanish Indies at the turn of seventeenth century. During a "Spanish Decade" covering the initial years of Tokugawa Ieyasu's rule, the shogunate invested more in its relationship with imperial Spain than with any other European community. Japanese leadership saw in the Spanish Indies the potential to bring foreign trade to Eastern Japan, to extend commerce across the Pacific Ocean, and to make available valuable mining technologies at a time when Japan's production was booming. However, these same opportunities doubled as sources of tension, as actors and intermediaries struggled to reach agreement on the volume of trade, the geography of exchange, and how, if at all, to share expertise. This paper assesses three paths of Japanese outreach: the “Old Road” of existing exchange between southwest Japan and the Philippines; the “New Road” of proposed exchange between eastern Japan and Spanish America; and the “Silver Rut,” in reference to the precious metal’s role as both a catalyst and impediment to Tokugawa efforts to expand relations. Though the precious metal facilitated or anchored long-distance trade in other contexts, here it exemplifies Tokugawa outreach, Spanish caution, and the struggle to bridge the gap between the world’s two leading silver producers at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Joshua Batts is a postdoctoral researcher and current member ERC Horizon 2020 project "Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592–98" at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a historian of early modern Japan, specializing in Japan's foreign encounters, mineral resources, and the relationship between the two. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 2017 and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo and at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His monograph, Pacific Overtures: Tokugawa Outreach to Habsburg Spain, 1600-1625, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. From November 2024, he will lead the ERC Starting Grant project "Material Authority: Managing Mineral Abundance in Early Modern Japan."
