States and Markets in East Asia and Beyond

A perennial feature of the economic and business history literature on modern East Asia is the variegated roles centralized states have played in supporting (or failing to support) trade and industry, roles often viewed as distinct from those played by governments in market economies elsewhere. Our panel explores this evolving relationship between state, market, and society in and across four East Asian regions in four separate eras, each defined by increasing regional and global economic integration. The role of the state in growing markets in East Asia has historically been quite pronounced, and not simply in the well-studied postwar “developmental states” of Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. The papers presented in this panel by John D’Amico, Bill Kelson, Lillian Tsay, and Jason Petrulis will examine the complexities of East Asian state-market interactions with a wider lens and over a broader time horizon. Whether it was relations of indebtedness between samurai and merchants in Tokugawa Japan (D’Amico), Qing dynasty attempts to drum up merchant investment in state-backed coal mines in China in the 1870s and 1880s (Kelson), Japanese bureaucrats’ heavy hand in intra-Asian sugar markets during the Second World War (Tsay), or the global export of wigs from British colonial Hong Kong in the 1960s (Petrulis), markets and states have an intertwined history in the region. Much can be learned by putting these diverse histories in conversation with one another, as we propose to do in our panel. In doing so, we hope to transcend divisions of region and periodization that often separate specialists in East Asian business history. Conversely, we hope to bring concepts shared across regional historiographies to a wider BHC audience, whose members have other area specializations but similar subject matter interests in state-market relations and globalization.