Abstract

Who Depends on the Global Economy?: Silk, Power, and Nationalist Narratives in the Global Pacific

The United States features the world’s largest consumer economy and depends on foreign imports from countries in Asia to support this global arrangement. Given the current politics of globalization, assessing how the U.S. has historically interpreted its foreign trade with Asia is critical in the realm of foreign relations. My paper examines U.S. consumption of Japanese raw silk between WWI and WWII, a time when U.S. imports of silk critically informed U.S. foreign relations with China and Japan during a fraught era in Sino-Japanese history. During these decades, the U.S. was the world’s largest consumer of raw silk and Japan’s primary export market. I argue that to make sense of U.S. international relations centered on foreign trade, U.S. trade interdependence needs to be interpreted through a nationalist framework that prioritizes narratives about the U.S. consumer experience. My paper examines a range of state and corporate actors and consumers connected to U.S. silk imports. The global politics of U.S. silk production and consumption during the interwar period shaped the United States’ response to Japan’s rise as an imperial Pacific power and growing territorial expanse in Asia. In the aftermath of WWI, U.S. and Japanese silk industry interests advanced that the silk industry would strengthen U.S.-Japanese ties given the nations’ mutual interest in the profitable silk trade. The problem with this claim was that U.S. leaders in both government and business supported narratives portraying U.S. silk consumption as evidence of Japan’s lesser status within the global order. Japan was deemed a dependent of U.S. consumer largesse while the United States’ own growing entanglements in global markets was propagated as proof of the nation’s wealth and progress. This arrangement ultimately lasted until the U.S. determined it must restrict Japan’s silk imports as a strategic act to blunt Japan’s military advancement in Asia shortly prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.