Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

■■■

The origins of this book, being the first in the new series on , date from the early projects and common synergies that Lucio de Sousa and I started respectively in Japan and China. The GECEM project, funded by the ERC, and the Global History Network in China (GHN) has contributed with no doubt to embark on such new project to better understand the disparities between East Asia, mainly China and Japan, and the West. The use of new empirical evidence and cross referencing Western and Eastern sources is a paramount element to reframe the debate of the great divergence and the new directions of global history. New case studies and new questions are crucial to overcome in the West the harsh critics to global history, the so-called Eurocentric exceptionalism, but also to outdo the prevailing Sinocentric focus regarding China studies. This project places a special emphasis on the polycentric economic areas of the world, not only from China, Japan and Europe, but also the Americas. Therefore, the ultimate aim is to analyse economic growth from a local to a global perspective without repeatedly making emphasis in core areas that traditional historiography has done in the past to praise national histories.

The chapter analyses reasons why the scientific revolution that has so profoundly affected the modern world developed in Europe, not in China, which before the sixteenth century boasted a far more highly developed level of scientific knowledge than was the case in Europe. It proceeds from the work of the great British scientist Joseph Needham (1900–1995), who masterminded the multi-volume series. The reasons for the difference between Europe and China include material factors such as the physical environment. However, this chapter focuses more on the philosophical and cultural factors, including negative factors in China such as Confucian bureaucratism. It argues that comparative science is a topic of the utmost importance for global history.

European countries have fragmented regulations about the manufacture and operation of civil drones; therefore, European institutions are trying to combine all these regulations into a common one by 2019. Until this common framework arrives, not only law but also ethics can give guidelines to the industry to satisfy national standards as well as users’ concerns. The European Aviation Safety Agency promotes the highest common standards of safety and develops common safety rules at the European level. This agency and its national equivalents monitor the activity of producers and operators, but, depending on the size of the drone, this activity could cover regulation measures or ethical recommendations. In this sense the aim of our analysis is to categorize the types of hard–soft regulations that we find in the European Union. Our study is based on a content analysis from four sources of information: scientific papers, policies and regulation proposals from the European Union, the regulation and co-regulation of some European countries, and the self-regulation of some drone companies’ associations. In general, few countries have chosen self-regulation as a solution to the problems, although in other economic sectors there are positive experiences. With our results we would like to give advice to the European industry as well as providing academia and policy makers with new insights.

The sweet potato () and other American high-yield cereal crops played a key role in Chinese agricultural production and national consumption. The importance of comprehending the introduction and distribution of sweet potato in China to the further study of the early modern Chinese economy and culture has been acknowledged by academia. In this chapter, a survey of Chinese historiography on the introduction of sweet potato has been carried out through a sample of 181 articles, from 1958 to 2015, which includes the main journals of natural sciences and economic history in China. Only 30 articles were found to be qualified for the field of economic history. The aim is to observe the historiographical trend and impact in Chinese studies of the introduction of American crops, such as sweet potato, which transformed the Chinese economy and contributed to the ongoing debate as to whether this crop was indigenous to China or was of American origin. The significance of the literature review includes a brief history of the phases of research of sweet potato in China, the main topics of discussion in Chinese historiography and what further research should focus on.

In the early nineteenth century, China descended into a prolonged economic decline commonly referred to as the ‘Daoguang Depression’ (1820–1850). It has been argued that the chief cause of this deflation in silver prices was a massive outflow of silver during these years, a reversal of the centuries-long pattern of silver flowing into China. But the ‘drain of silver’ thesis is flawed on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Price deflation in the early nineteenth century cannot be correlated either with population trends or fluctuations in silver imports or in foreign trade generally. Instead, the causes of the Daoguang Depression must be found in the domestic economy, and especially in the growing regional economic autarky that reversed the eighteenth-century trend towards national market integration.

This chapter focuses on kaiiki-shi in Japanese historiography and tries to connect it to world/global history. Currently, in conjunction with the growing interest in world/global history, kaiiki-shi certainly established its position in Japanese academia. Its perspective unveils cross-boundary communications and makes us realize the existence of a rich ‘worlds’ across conventional boundaries. From this perspective, national boundaries are dissolved. In this respect, kaiiki-shi is remarked by world/global historians in Japan. However, what we need to keep in mind is the fact that more and more we argue kaiiki-shi and more and more we recognize its significance, kaiiki certainly obtains its geographical boundary. In order to seek a real connection between kaiiki-shi and world/global history, certainly this is the mine we need to sweep.

The tributary trade system enforced in the late fourteenth century by the early Ming state reached its zenith in the early fifteenth century. But from the mid- fifteenth century, ‘mutual trade’ and smuggling trade gradually developed along the maritime and inland peripheries. In around 1570, the Ming court was obliged to permit mutual and tributary trade with the Mongols and visiting trade by the Chinese merchants to Southeast Asia, and Europeans opened up new trading routes through which voluminous foreign silver was flowed into China. As a result, international trade order of the Eastern Asia was reorganized into a new system in which various trade routes coexisted and interacted: the ‘1570 System’.

The primary momentum for the trade was the need for importing military in the Age of Civil Wars. Japanese history merged with the great trends of world history, probably leading to many social changes. In this period, Japan and Southeast Asia were linked by many routes through many intermediaries, and the trade between Macao and Japan was probably one of them. The opening of the port of Nagasaki provided the opportunity for linking Japan with the world beyond Southeast Asia, and the imprints of the activities of those traders deeply remain in modern Japan in the form of culture, with resonances in food, clothing, art and so on. The analysis in this chapter clarifies that many individual figures/players were involved in trading activities during the latter half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, and also explains the structure of Japanese trade in that era. In previous Japanese studies on this period, Portuguese Nanban trade, Shuinsen trade and the new participants (VOC and EIC) have tended to be examined by different historians taking into account their ‘territories’. However, I suggest that future research should study these trading forces more comprehensively rather than by each individual factor in order to more effectively clarify the role of Japan in international surroundings from the perspective of global history.

This chapter presents a variety of documented evidence that trace the (-) diaspora from Europe to India and its consequent expansion to China and Japan. These , as well as their commercial agents, are almost or partially unknown because they used several languages and forged different identities to escape from the Iberian authorities. A new research on them is very important to understand their contribution in the European commercial networks built in China and Japan during the early modern period. The author proposes to reconstruct the link between inquisitorial persecutions and the presence in China and Japan, as well as to rebuild a social representation of the communities that existed in Macau and Nagasaki in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.