Brief but engaging, Professor Blussé's book – based on the Reischauer Lectures that he delivered while visiting at Harvard University – examines three port cities central to the late eighteenth-century Asian and world trading systems: Canton [Guangzhou], Nagasaki, and Batavia. In three substantive chapters, Blussé looks at the broader historical context of trade in the China Sea (ch. 1), what the ports looked like and how they handled trade (ch. 2), and the ways in which specific individuals experienced Canton, Nagasaki, or Batavia (ch. 3).

Blussé chose these cities because he was interested in exploring places ‘where East and West met in strikingly different but also similar ways’ (p. 3). As a well-known scholar of the Dutch colonial enterprise in Asia, Blussé was also interested in bringing to Harvard a historical discussion of the maritime world, which he suggests has been ‘somewhat neglected’ there (p. 4). Fittingly, he claims that focusing on three cities that also served as important gateways to the interiors of Java, China, and Japan will enhance scholarly understanding of the place of Asian states in the early modern world: ‘Through the windows of Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia we can witness the advent of modernity’ (p. 8).

In the part of the Pacific Ocean in which Blussé is interested – the China Sea from Japan south to the Indonesian archipelago – the vicissitudes of China's official maritime policies, as well as the substantial amount of Chinese private seaborne commerce, set the stage (ch. 1). In the early modern period from 1400 to 1800, what China did mattered. Blussé is careful to point out, though, ‘the limitations of the [Chinese] official mind’: that is, what actually happened cannot be captured by reading only official Chinese documents, the mainstay of the Harvard approach to Chinese maritime history (pp. 11–14). Rather, Blussé cites extensive recent research showing that ‘early modern Chinese overseas trade expansion should be seen as resulting not from the tribute system of the imperial government, as many Sino-centric historians have maintained, but rather from the commercialization of the local economy … throughout China's southeastern coastal provinces’ (p. 14).

Given that context, Blussé assesses the arrival of Europeans in Asian water, ultimately focusing on the Dutch, and the near-simultaneous expansion of Japanese overseas trade during the sixteenth century. Substantial change came in the eighteenth century, after the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu promulgated a series of maritime prohibitions, both the Dutch experiment and the Zheng empire (Koxinga and his son) on Taiwan rose and fell, and the Manchus suppressed the last challenges to their rule. In 1684, China's restrictions on private seaborne trade were lifted, and by 1700 the China Sea was filled with thousands of Chinese junks sailing up and down the China coast and to ports in Japan and Southeast Asia.

But trade was by no means ‘free’. The Dutch VOC was determined to maintain its monopoly and squeeze out other European competitors; the Japanese bakufu restricted trade to Nagasaki, initially allowing two Dutch ships and thirty Chinese junks annually (p. 48); and when China could control neither its merchants nor especially the English, by 1760 it channelled all trade with Europe through Canton. For the most part, the eighteenth century was an era of managed trade in the China sea, much to the benefit of the managers.

In Chapter 2, ‘Managing trade across cultures,’ Blussé provides fascinating insights into how, precisely, the Chinese and Japanese organized and managed foreign trade at Canton and Nagasaki, and into the rise and decline of Batavia. Founded by the Dutch explicitly to anchor its Asian trade, Batavia presented a whitewashed European façade to which Chinese merchants supplied nearly all of its basic needs in trade carried on Chinese junks. What kept Batavia going and growing was the two-way trade with China, not trade with the interior of Java. Batavia soon split in two, not simply as a result of the 1740 massacre of Chinese residents, the survivors of which were then segregated into a Chinatown, but because of lesser-known environmental problems. Fish ponds at the mouth of the silted-up Ciliwung River bred malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes, forcing the abandonment of the city in the lowlands and its rebuilding on higher, less malarial, ground. In the 1750s, decisions of the VOC to bypass Batavia by setting up a separate ‘China Committee’ to manage trade directly between China and Holland led to the decline of trade between China and Batavia. The Chinese merchant community, deprived of the opportunities to survive as merchants and neither wanting nor able to return to China, set off from Batavia to farm the interior. As a result, by the 1790s, Batavia withered as a major port.

A similar fate befell Nagasaki, but for rather different reasons. Blussé tells the story of the manmade island of Deshima, exploring the conditions of life for the Dutch contingent living there and explaining its operation as both a closely controlled port for the Japanese bakufu and a source of information for the Japanese about the wider world, especially Europe and China. Concern about copper exports led the bakufu in 1790 to restrict trade to one Dutch ship per year and seven Chinese junks. When Dutch ships were not able to make even that one voyage because of war with Britain (over Dutch support for the American Revolution) and then the Napoleonic Wars, American clippers slipped into Nagasaki harbour after bringing down the Stars and Stripes and raising the Dutch tricolour. European wars and American independence opened a window – if ever so briefly – for American shipping to capture the China market (and enrich the capitalists in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Salem), before being slammed shut when the US President Jefferson ‘imposed his infamous Embargo Act of 1807’ (p. 100).

Where Batavia and Nagasaki had declined by the late eighteenth century, Canton boomed. The story of how and why that happened – the Chinese monopoly on the world's tea production, British consumption of huge quantities of tea, and British payment for it, first in silver and then with profits made from the illegal sale of opium – is well known.

Blussé's comparative perspective is worth noting: ‘Batavia collapsed because of the changing fortunes in global trade, and Nagasaki's trade dwindled as a result of national policy. But Canton experienced a meteoric rise thanks to tea, a unique article of export that only China could offer the world’ (p. 65). Of course, that too was about to change, with opium and the Opium War. But rather than pin major changes in the balance of forces in Asia and the world to that singular event, Blussé argues that it was Thomas Samuel Raffles’ idea to establish a free port (Singapore) in the 1820s that presaged the establishment of free ports throughout Asia after 1842 and the demise of the controlled trade that each of Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia had represented. This is the distinctive perspective on the early-modern-to-modern transition in maritime East Asia that Blussé had promised. Blussé thus implicitly argues that the establishment of Singapore was more historically significant than the outcome of the Opium War.

In Chapter 3, Blussé makes the valiant attempt to bring fresh voices to bear by looking for contemporaries living through the ‘big changes’, as Charles Tilly might have put it. He finds a few Chinese voices (‘a bit disappointing, but there it is’, he says about an 1804 Cantonese novel about foreign trade (p. 74) ) and interesting observations on the Dutch by Japanese painters and students of rangaku (‘Dutch studies’). But most of the lived experience he finds are Dutchmen, three of whom he follows in and around East Asia. Curiously, Blussé makes quite a bit out of others making quite a bit out of the Dutch willingness to undergo ‘supposedly humiliating’ rituals, such as the kowtow when visiting the Qianlong emperor on the occasion of his birthday in 1794 (just after the Macarthney Mission), and a number of other times at royal courts elsewhere in Asia. But it is Blussé himself who makes the point (in Chapter 2) of quoting the controlling Heren XVII of the VOC: ‘[N]o great attention should be paid to the question of reputation and honor, which is often taken too seriously; in our opinion (for we are merchants) he has the honor who without doing injustice or violence has the profit’ (p. 35, emphasis in original). To the Dutch VOC, there was nothing more important than profit; they left worrying about ‘reputation and honor’ to the British.

Given that this book is based on just a few lectures, it accomplishes a great deal but, as Blussé himself no doubt realizes, leaves much unsaid. Particularly important is an exploration of the relationship of these port cities – which he conceives and discusses as nodes in a global trading network – to their hinterlands, for the comparison might have proven telling. For Canton, its hinterland was an area the size of France, with a population of 25 million. Nagasaki was one of the bakufu's direct-ruled cities, but where its food, clothing, and fuel came from is another question. As for Batavia, a discussion of the connections or lack thereof of the VOC with the Muslim sultans of Java might have proved fruitful.