The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan

In October 1627 a grand embassy arrived in Edo, the Tokugawa government’s sprawling political capital. It had been sent by the Dutch East India Company, which was rapidly emerging as the most influential European enterprise in Asia. At the front of the procession borne high on the shoulders of six men in a special palanquin was Pieter Nuyts, recent graduate from Leiden University, extraordinary councilor of the Indies, and now special ambassador to the shogun of Japan. He was followed by an impressive retinue, almost three hundred strong, of Dutch soldiers, heavily armed samurai, liveried pages, translators, grooms, and dozens of servants. Carefully planned and enormously expensive, the 1627 embassy was intended to reflect the company’s growing confidence, and it came equipped not only with a rich array of gifts but also a list of demands for the shogun.

Just over a month later, Nuyts prepared to flee Edo in the middle of the night, his embassy summarily rejected without ever seeing the shogun, his gifts brushed aside, his demands left unheard. This time no retinue gathered to accompany the ambassador on his journey. With no official permission to depart, Nuyts was only able to assemble a handful of bearers to carry his palanquin through the Edo’s darkened streets.¹ Underway at last after hours of waiting, they made it only as far as the end of the road before they were halted by the cry of a local watchman. Startled by the command, the bearers abruptly dropped their burden and scattered, leaving the ambassador marooned in the middle of the street.

Nuyts’s embassy may have been a particularly spectacular failure, but his more general experience was in no way unique. Indeed, many other European representatives in Asia found themselves in a similar position, isolated and shorn of any recognition of their status or authority. Individuals like Pieter Nuyts occupied a precarious position on the frontline of a global encounter between Europe and Asia that had commenced in 1497 when Vasco da Gama’s small fleet opened up new trade routes to India. Over the next two hundred years these routes gradually lengthened until they encompassed the globe and thickened until they became reliable highways for long-distance commerce. After da Gama’s pioneering voyage, tens of thousands of Europeans, first the Portuguese, but later the Spanish, Dutch, and English, moved into Asian waters. There they came into contact with a series of powerful states equipped with military, economic, and cultural resources far exceeding those wielded by the most dominant regimes in Europe. The result was scenes like that in Japan in 1627 as Europeans scrambled to find a place on the fringes of Asian orders.

This study examines one such encounter between Europeans and a powerful Asian state. It focuses on the interaction between the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC), arguably the most formidable of all European overseas organizations active in Asia in the seventeenth century, and the Tokugawa regime, which maintained a tight grip over the Japanese archipelago for more than two hundred and fifty years. Through an analysis of key moments in this engagement, it aims to ask a series of questions about what is sometimes called the first age of globalization: What was the nature and extent of European power in early modern Asia? How did Europeans manage their encounters with Asian states like Tokugawa Japan and what place did they find in local political orders? Finally, how does an examination of the politics of encounter alter our understanding of what has traditionally been termed the “rise of Europe”?

When he arrived back from his first voyage, Columbus reported that he had “discovered many islands, thickly peopled, of which I took possession in the name of our most illustrious Monarch.”² His statement, with all its characteristic confidence, describes the key act of westward expansion, the ceremony of possession.³ The first of Columbus’s many such declarations took place on 12 October 1492 when, after a long voyage of thirty-three days, the admiral stepped onto the island of Guanahani carrying a royal flag. With his witnesses clustered around him and the distant bulk of his ships looming in the background, Columbus took “possession of the said island for the King and for the Queen … making the declarations that are required.”⁴ In the typically triumphalist depictions of this famous scene that still adorn many public buildings, the admiral is shown armed with a sword and banner claiming foreign lands on behalf of his Spanish masters as the indigenous population, both terrified and awed, huddles in the background offering no opposition.

Over the next decades, these ceremonies of possession were replicated again and again, laying the basis for an empire that stretched first along the coasts before pushing steadily inland. The rapid pace of European expansion is conventionally attributed to two key advantages that combined to push out the boundaries of influence and, in time, reorder the American continents. Historians have focused first on a fearsome set of technologies—iron weapons capable of slicing through cloth and flesh, firearms that could kill from a distance, and steel armor able to protect the wearer from harm—brought by Europeans and deployed with frightening effect.⁵ In isolation these could be formidable, but together they proved almost unstoppable, capable of turning battles against far greater hosts. Just a few decades after the encounter on Guanahani, Hernán Cortés famously brought down the Aztec empire with a total force of just two thousand well-armed Spanish troops. His achievement was matched by a much smaller contingent of just 167 solders under the command of Francisco Pizarro that marched into Central America and, winning a series of victories along the way, overthrew the sprawling Incan state.⁶ These tools of war were paired with a powerful sense of confidence that, scholars have argued, enabled Europeans to view the New World as a blank page onto which their desires and ambitions could be written.⁷ This absolute belief in European superiority was buttressed, rather than undermined, by encounters with new civilizations, and it drove small, outnumbered groups of adventurers to lay claim to expansive tracts of land and declare war on powerful indigenous states.

In recent decades the triumphal narrative that once celebrated European explorers and settlers as pioneers of civilization has been largely silenced—at least in academic writing—and replaced with a new understanding of the destructive consequences of the Columbian experience. Yet, despite this shift, the basic outlines of the confident, conquering European remain largely unchanged.⁸ While expansion westward, with its dramatic stories of conquest and subjugation, continues to occupy a central place in scholarship, considerably less attention has been paid to how Europeans fared in Asia and particularly to how they dealt with the states they found there. As a result, the familiar image of the European arriving on distant shores armed with technological advantages and an absolute belief in his own superiority is sometimes simply lifted from the American context and applied without much modification to Asia. In this way Columbus’s shadow looms large over world history, undermining attempts to better understand the limits of European power in early modern Asia.⁹

Historians searching for evidence of European strength in Asia have turned to a familiar pairing. One group has argued that military technology, especially the gunned ship, transformed the politics of Asian seas, while a second has looked to cultural assumptions by suggesting that disparate encounters were underpinned by a basic confidence that enabled Europeans to silence their Asian interlocutors.¹⁰ The latter is of course the logic of Edward Said’s groundbreaking study of orientalism, which, though it focuses on a later period, has been projected back as historians, particularly those interested in establishing connections with modern empire, have reached across the historical divide to pull the politics of high imperialism into earlier centuries.¹¹ The rush of studies that have followed Said’s pioneering work take the idea of the confident European secure in the knowledge of his own superiority as their most basic premise, while aiming simultaneously to unpick the internal logic of orientalist discourse. One figure to receive particular attention is Thomas Roe, an English ambassador sent to India in the seventeenth century, whose diaries provide evidence of what Jyotsna Singh calls the “colonizing imagination” that enabled Europeans to order the region and its people long before the age of territorial empire.¹²

When ideas about technology and cultural confidence merge, they create a notion readily visible in textbooks that 1500 represented a crucial historical moment when a confident, well-armed Europe surged ahead both in the New World and Asia, thereby creating the modern world. The idea of a European watershed finds one of its clearest expressions in a 1998 work by the eminent historian David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.¹³ For Landes, Columbus’s and da Gama’s voyages mark the onset of the modern age as Europeans, inheritors of a more vigorous culture, moved to confront and eventually overwhelm more static civilizations like Ming China, which “lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity.”¹⁴ The theme of the work is one of inevitable European mastery organized around a single imperial time line.

But when we look more closely at the concrete details of the encounter between Europe and Asia, it becomes difficult to sustain any notion that 1500 marked a clear turning point. While there were occasional episodes of technological dominance and irresistible confidence, these cannot be strung together into a wider pattern of European power. This central fact has been recognized by a group of scholars who have argued against what Tonio Andrade, a leading representative of this revisionist approach, calls the “1492 Schema” of history that seeks to equate the voyages of exploration with the “rise of the west.”¹⁵ Working in a number of different fields, they have combined to batter away at this schema from a variety of angles.¹⁶ Historians like Kenneth Swope, Peter Lorge, and Sun Laichen have argued against the excessive focus on European technological innovation by pointing to the existence of an Asian military revolution that paralleled developments in Europe.¹⁷ Other scholars such as Leonard Blussé and Tonio Andrade himself have convincingly demonstrated the Asian roots of European success, showing how in places like Taiwan or Batavia a thin overlay of European structures served to conceal a far more substantial Asian base, while William Thompson and G. V. Scammell have focused on the key role played by local allies in facilitating European expansion.¹⁸ They have been joined by a group of innovative economic historians who, contesting long-held views about comparative levels of development, have combined to mount a particularly vigorous attack on the “1492 Schema” with scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, R. Bin Wong, Andre Gunder Frank, and others arguing that the time line of European ascendancy should be pushed back beyond 1800.¹⁹

The result of such studies, of which only a handful has been mentioned here, has been to call into question any notion of a European watershed in the early modern period. Across the region the more common narrative was one of containment, as Europeans found that even the sharpest of weapons could be blunted or, as was the case in Japan, stripped away from them. In the absence of real leverage, they were forced to rely on negotiation, petition, and appeal to carve out what was at best a limited space for their operations within an extant political order. The protracted and often desperate scramble to secure a place in Asia had the added effect of undermining any illusion of superiority. In this way, European expansion in this period was characterized more by a sense of anxiety, which came to permeate a range of Asian interactions, than by confidence.

The key variable responsible for triggering an immediate divergence from the Columbian experience was the presence of Asian states, formidable political actors used to dealing with foreigners and fully capable of resisting their demands. From the moment of first contact, when his expedition arrived in the port of Calicut on the west coast of India in 1498, da Gama struggled to manage such encounters. Unable to bend the ruler of Calicut to his will, the Portuguese explorer was forced into the position of supplicant, appearing in court armed with diplomatic letters, rather than markers of possession, and eager to negotiate.²⁰ In the process, da Gama inaugurated a pattern that would be repeated as Europeans pushed deeper into Asia. Indeed, if the ceremony of possession stands at the heart of European expansion into the Americas, then its equivalent in Asia was the embassy dispatched to a local sovereign in order to bargain for concessions, and the sharp difference between the two acts highlights the divergent nature of the European experience.

While da Gama approached Calicut with considerable caution, its ruler was in fact a relatively minor potentate with no great influence, and within a few decades Europeans were thrust into contact with far more impressive states like Ming China, Mughal India, and Tokugawa Japan, which occupied central positions in an increasingly interconnected global economy. The size and power of such polities filled Europeans with trepidation. Writing about China, one author cautioned his readers that words alone could not convey the richness of the country: “I hereby give readers a necessary warning by which they can conjecture the greatness of the things of China, viz.—that whereas distant things often sound greater than they really are, this is clean contrary (because China is much more than it sounds)…. This must be seen and not heard, because hearing it is nothing in comparison with seeing it.”²¹

If we are to look for one representative to stand in for European expansion in early modern Asia, then we might find it in the unlikely figure of Jonathan Swift’s intrepid mariner, Lemuel Gulliver, who made his debut in 1726.²² Unlike other fictional castaways, most notably Robinson Crusoe, who carved out their own kingdoms, Gulliver runs into a succession of states and rulers.²³ In each case he is left impotent and uncertain, struggling to manage his encounter. In the kingdom of Lilliput, Swift’s hero stumbles upon a realm populated by diminutive inhabitants less than one tenth his stature. Despite his size, Gulliver quickly discovers that he has no real influence. Rather than setting himself up as a godlike ruler, he is forced to render military service and to prostrate himself before the local monarch.²⁴

On the island of Brobdingnag, Gulliver finds himself in a society of giants in which he is threatened by even the tiniest of the creatures. To survive, he becomes a royal plaything compelled to perform endlessly before the members of the court. Faced by the Houyhnhnms, a highly intelligent horselike species that he encounters in his final voyage, Gulliver loses all faith in the power of European civilization and resolves to abandon his homeland altogether. In each interaction Gulliver is isolated, stripped of the power that other explorers wield so confidently, and rendered desperately uncertain. In response, he is forced to adapt by declaring himself “most humble creature and vassal” in order to claim a position on the edges of more powerful societies.²⁵ In the end his transformation is so complete that he passes through civilizational barriers and emerges on the other side utterly changed. When compelled to leave his Houyhnhnm master, Gulliver kneels “to kiss his hoof” in a final act of submission to a superior society.²⁶

Although of course fictional, the basic pattern of Gulliver’s encounters would have been a familiar one for many European agents in Asia who found themselves similarly trapped in strange lands with no real power. Twin questions, one of interaction and one of adaptation, bring us to the heart of their experience. First, what was the nature of the encounter between European enterprises and Asian states? The goal here is not to answer the now dated call for autonomous history by writing Europeans out of the picture—although they were often marginal—but rather to document the precise nature of their engagements with the most important political units in Asia.²⁷ To do so requires a recognition of the often formidable tools brought by Europeans, but also an examination of how these were actually deployed on the ground.

In the decades since scholars first started to reassess the nature of the European presence in Asia, two models capable of providing a broad framework within which to consider interaction have emerged. Both emphasize the limited nature of European incursions into Asia, but they do so in very different ways. Arguing against notions of a unitary “Vasco da Gama epoch” of European hegemony stretching from the moment of first arrival in 1498 to the onset of decolonization in 1945, Holden Furber famously described the early modern period as an “age of partnership” in which close bonds developed between Europeans and their Asian interlocutors.²⁸ For Furber, this long time span was characterized more by cooperation “than by assertions of power and hostility.”²⁹ The result was to treat Europe’s push into Asia as an extended and relatively conflict-free learning process during which both sides drew gradually closer to each other. Furber’s approach, with its emphasis on mutual accommodation, lends itself naturally to a longue durée style of analysis that considers interaction across multiple decades or even centuries rather than years. One of the more recent of many successor studies to adopt this framework examines the Dutch presence in Siam across the period from 1604 to 1765.³⁰ Although individual episodes are treated as important milestones, the overall emphasis is on the steady accretion of knowledge over time, a process that was only broken by the advent of industrial imperialism in the early nineteenth century.

While recognizing its importance in changing the terms of the historical debate, some scholars have criticized Furber’s work for offering an overly rosy view of relations characterized by mutual understanding and shared structures.³¹ In 1990, Sanjay Subrahmanyam challenged this notion of an extended partnership by highlighting the underlying violence of the period and the incessant conflicts that took place between Europeans and Asian rulers, officials, or merchants. His work described the period more darkly as an “age of contained conflict” in which there were “numerous trials of strength, mutual probings for chinks in the armour, and repeated localized conflicts.”³² Unlike the sweeping studies that make use of the “age of partnership” framework, this model proves best suited to a different kind of analysis oriented around highly detailed accounts of individual conflicts.³³ Although the focus is on the breakdown of relations, Subrahmanyam’s notion of a period marked by regular clashes incorporates a kind of learning process, but a far more violent one in which accommodation was reached more often because the weaker side retreated than because the two parties met in the middle. In this way these conflicts can be seen as something more than anomalous moments when otherwise functional arrangements broke down. To the contrary, such skirmishes were, in many cases, directly responsible for creating a system capable of regulating relations between European enterprises and Asian states. They were, in other words, productive, functioning to set the rules for subsequent interactions.

The emphasis on conflict and its productive capacity leads in turn to a second question about the nature of the European response and particularly to a focus on adaptation. Like Gulliver, Europeans in Asia were compelled to shift position, make concessions, or, at times, wholly reinvent themselves to secure a place on the fringes of powerful local states. This process of adjustment and accommodation was central to the European experience in early modern Asia, but a focus on it runs against one of the most well-established conventions in Asian history, that is, the overwhelming emphasis on understanding how Asian states either adapted to claim a place in a Western-dominated world order in the nineteenth century or succumbed to a colonial embrace. And yet, however important, this later period was, in the final assessment, relatively brief. The result of work by Pomeranz and other economic historians has been to show that Asian states were far more powerful for far longer than previously imagined and to reveal the temporal limitations of European dominance. Indeed, it has become increasingly apparent that the default setting for the bulk of recorded history, aside from a clearly bracketed phase in which the tools of industrial imperialism allowed unprecedented expansion, was one in which Asia was paramount.³⁴ If this is the case, it becomes all the more important to move away from Eurocentric or Americentric versions of history to understand exactly how Europeans adapted to find a place in Asian-dominated political orders. This study aims to contribute to this wider program by considering the Dutch encounter with Japan.

The first VOC ships appeared in Japan in 1609, just as a newly established regime, usually labeled by modern scholars as the Tokugawa Bakufu, was in the process of consolidating its hold over the archipelago. Emerging after a long period of endemic conflict, the system of government crafted by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the last of Japan’s three great unifiers, welded a central administration to over two hundred semi-independent domainal lords (daimyo) who were permitted to retain significant autonomy, including the right to maintain their own armies and collect taxes.³⁵ Refined by Ieyasu’s son (Hidetada, 1579–1632) and grandson (Iemitsu, 1604–1651), the Bakufu would, after weathering a period of initial turmoil, remain in place until the second half of the nineteenth century.

As they landed on Japanese soil for the first time, the Dutch found, in stark contrast to nearby China, a government willing, even eager, to engage with them and prepared to allow their representatives access to its political and commercial centers. The subsequent relationship between company and shogun proved remarkably durable, continuing virtually uninterrupted until the VOC collapsed under the weight of its debts in 1795.³⁶ From 1609 onward, the Dutch operated a permanently staffed base in Japan, first in the domain of Hirado on the northwestern tip of Kyushu and later on the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor. Although both iterations of the Japan factory, the contemporary term for a trading post, were situated on the western edges of the archipelago in Kyushu, VOC envoys traveled to Edo almost every year, often staying in the city for a number of months before receiving permission to depart. During these visits the Dutch came into regular contact with the shogun as well as the extended apparatus of the Tokugawa state.

Despite its astonishing longevity, the Tokugawa/VOC relationship has, especially in recent years, received comparatively little attention from scholars. This can be partly explained by developments within Tokugawa historiography and is the result of past attempts to overemphasize the importance of European influence on early modern Japan. In his much-reprinted work, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650, Charles Boxer argued that the introduction of Christianity in the sixteenth century by European missionaries had a transformative effect on the country, leading Japanese authorities, who were increasingly fearful of the subversive power of the new religion, to cut off contact with the outside world through the promulgation of the famous maritime restriction edicts of the 1630s.³⁷ Boxer’s study placed Europe at the center of Tokugawa foreign relations and assumed that the near total closure of ties with European overseas enterprises initiated a period of Japanese isolation. This view was decisively challenged in the 1980s by two scholars, Ronald Toby and Arano Yasunori, who demonstrated that Japan remained closely engaged with states in Asia, most notably Korea and the Ryukyu kingdom, long after the advent of Tokugawa maritime restrictions.³⁸ While their work was remarkably successful in putting Japan back into Asia and proving that links with Europe were not the sum total of foreign policy, an added consequence of Toby and Arano’s intervention has been an understandable turn away from a focus on Europeans in Japan.

Those studies that do exist have, with some important exceptions such as work by Reinier Hesselink and Matsukata Fuyoko, traditionally adopted one of two perspectives.³⁹ The first, particularly favored by Japanese scholars, is a narrow focus on trade. The approach is typified by Ryūto Shimada’s work, The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese Copper by the Dutch East India Company During the Eighteenth Century, which, like many recent studies of the VOC more generally, treats it as a purely commercial organization and seeks to understand the nature of Dutch trading networks. The second, perhaps best described as the comprehensive approach, aims to provide a general overview of the company’s position in Japan. The most important work in this vein is by the pioneering historian of the Dutch in Japan, Nagazumi Yōko, who separates out the Hirado period (1609–1641) to provide a reasonable focus for a broad-brush analysis that includes discussion of trade, politics, daily life, and a host of other issues.⁴⁰ While studies based on these two approaches make an invaluable contribution to understanding the Dutch presence in Japan, neither gets to the central question of the relationship between the company and the Tokugawa regime.

This study seeks to adopt a different approach. Its starting point is to look again at the nature of the organization itself. Although the use of the label company to describe the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie is ubiquitous (and will be employed throughout this study), this apparently straightforward term can in fact be highly misleading. The VOC, which has been called the world’s first multinational, did have certain features that made it look much like a modern company, but it also possessed sovereign powers to which even the most formidable Fortune 500 behemoth could never lay claim.⁴¹ Because of this, it can, following Jurrien van Goor, best be described as a hybrid organization that successfully combined the attributes of both corporation and state.⁴²

This composite nature can be traced directly back to the company’s foundational document, the 1602 charter, and particularly to a single article. Buried among a sequence of dry clauses stipulating the organization’s complicated business structure can be found article 35, which gave the VOC sovereign rights of the kind more conventionally monopolized by the state. It stated: “East of the Cape of Good Hope but also in and beyond the straits of Magellan, those of the aforementioned Company shall be allowed to enter into agreements and contracts with princes and potentates in the name of the States-General of the United Netherlands. They may also build fortresses and strongholds, appoint governors, armed forces, officers of justice and officers of other necessary services in order to preserve these places and maintain them in good order.”⁴³ Pulled apart, article 35 described three wide-ranging powers: the right to conduct direct diplomacy with any ruler it might encounter, the right to maintain (and of course deploy) military forces, and the right to seize control of territory (by building fortresses and strongholds). This potent trinity formed the organization’s birthright, and, from the moment its first ships appeared in Asian waters, the company made full use thereof.

Of the three powers listed here, there can be no question as to which were most frequently used. Leonard Blussé, the great historian of the VOC, has suggested that the company’s entire strategy in Asia hinged on two tools, diplomacy and violence. He describes the shift back and forth between “schenkagie (the pursuit of favourable trading conditions through gifts and diplomacy)” and “conqueste (the conquest of land or the exaction of favourable trade conditions through the medium of violence)” that came to characterize the organization’s operations.⁴⁴ Armed with letters and gifts, the leaders of the first Dutch expeditions sought to open direct ties with sovereigns across the region and use these to secure access to diplomatic networks. Although treaties had to be submitted to the States-General, the Dutch parliament, for approval, the great distances separating Europe and Asia meant that the company had what amounted to a free hand to engage in independent diplomacy. Running in parallel with this diplomatic push was an equally vigorous military one. Created by a state that was itself in the midst of a seemingly endless war, the VOC was deeply implicated in violence from the beginning. Dutch fleets attacked Iberian trading networks in Asia, targeted key strongholds like Manila and Melaka, and engaged in wide-scale privateering. Determined to gain access to the most profitable trading networks, the company was equally prepared to turn its guns against local rivals, firing on shipping belonging to Asian states when officials, denied access to markets, made common cause with their enemies or were seen to have violated perceived contractual rights. In addition to the rights to engage in diplomacy and violence, the VOC also claimed via article 35 the authority to build forts, appoint governors, create legal structures, and establish the full apparatus of government. This was in effect a blank check to establish colonies and it was cashed in places like Amboina, Java, Banda, and Taiwan, where the company acquired its first territorial holdings.

Historians of the VOC sometimes describe a process in which an essentially commercial organization was drawn reluctantly into empire building and gradually transformed in the process.⁴⁵ While it is true that the company never possessed a grand design for empire, it was also never just a conglomerate of merchants eager to buy cheaply and sell dearly. A study of the letters written by senior personnel based in Asia gives little sense that they thought of their employer as a limited organization that should concentrate its attentions purely on trade and avoid other entanglements. Instead, they saw it as a composite body with a route to profit that ran most directly through the expansion of Dutch power in Asia.⁴⁶ Although they have perhaps been cited too many times in too many different contexts, the words of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, an early governor-general, remain indicative of the wider attitudes displayed by officials on the frontier: “the Indies trade has to be pursued and maintained under the protection of one’s own arms and … the weapons must be financed through the profits so earned by trade. In short, trade without war or war without trade cannot be maintained.”⁴⁷ Rather than a reluctant actor led down a strange route by an uncertain political environment in Asia, the company was, from the beginning, as much a political and military creature as it was an economic one.⁴⁸

It was a feature clearly recognized by its competitors, who saw this as the most important characteristic of the Dutch model for expansion and something that required emulation if they wished to achieve the same measure of success. One of the most revealing assessments of the Dutch template came from the pen of the great seventeenth-century observer of the United Provinces, William Temple:

The last, I shall mention, is, the mighty advance they have made towards engrossing the whole commerce of the East-Indies, by their successes against the Portuguese, and by their many wars and victories against the natives, whereby they have forced them to treaties of commerce, exclusive to all other nations, and to the admission of Forts to be built upon straits and passes, that command the entrances into the traffic of such places. This has been [achieved] … by the conduct and application of the East-India company, who have managed it like a commonwealth, rather than a trade, and thereby raised a State in the Indies, governed indeed by the orders of the company, but otherwise appearing to those nations like a Sovereign State, making war and peace with their greatest Kings, and able to bring to sea forty or fifty men of war, and thirty thousand men at land, by the modestest computations.⁴⁹

Such a pattern is immediately evident in Japan where the company arrived with ambitious plans to secure Tokugawa diplomatic recognition (in order to improve its negotiating position), gain control over key trading routes, evict its rivals (most notably the Portuguese), and establish itself as the preeminent maritime power in East Asia. In discussions with Bakufu officials, company agents asserted—after a temporary interlude in which they reached back to Europe for diplomatic legitimacy—the governor-general’s rights to dispatch embassies directly to Edo, insisted that they could wage war in the shogun’s waters against Japan’s most important trading partners, and claimed part of the island of Taiwan for themselves while denying access to Japanese merchants who had sailed there for years. To realize these ambitions, the company was ready to deploy its own weapons, most notably a powerful fleet, but also a versatile language of legal rationalization that was supplied in part by famous scholars such as Hugo Grotius.⁵⁰

Such tactics turned the company into an unruly presence in an increasingly orderly Tokugawa world and brought it into repeated conflict with Japanese authorities. The resultant clashes over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty, the three powers granted by article 35 of the charter, provide the subject of this book. Like Subrahmanyam, I see this period as an “age of contained conflict” in which interaction was defined not by a relatively harmonious partnership but by a sequence of clashes. Tunneling down through the available sources (both Dutch and Japanese), my aim is to provide detailed case studies of these individual conflicts. In this way the book eschews a more comprehensive approach in favor of a focus on a series of key moments. It is not, in other words, a history of the Dutch in Japan or indeed of VOC trade, which has been covered in considerable detail by a number of different scholars, but rather an analysis of how the company’s nature as a hybrid organization played out in the archipelago.⁵¹

Focusing on these conflicts allows a pivot away from the well-known story of Dutch moderation in Japan. The standard analysis of the Dutch highlights their role as enterprising Protestant merchants interested exclusively in trade and who pursued, in Grant Goodman’s words, a “steady and moderate policy” that enabled them—in contrast to their Portuguese rivals who were more concerned with saving souls—to avoid unnecessary clashes with the Japanese regime.⁵² In fact a closer look at the first half of the seventeenth century shows that the Dutch in Japan veered precariously from confrontation to confrontation. Whereas VOC records tend to present the Bakufu as a tyrannical regime that persisted in making unreasonable demands, many of the problems that the organization encountered were to a large extent of its own creation, and they stemmed not from shogunal whims but from the company’s policies. Far from the meek merchants they are sometimes imagined as, the Dutch were, particularly in the early years of the Japan factory, a violent and disruptive presence in Tokugawa Japan.

In addition to documenting the individual disputes that emerged as a result of the company’s insistence on its sovereign prerogatives, I seek to demonstrate that they enduringly shaped the nature of the Dutch presence in Japan. When their first ships appeared in Japanese harbors in 1609, the Dutch did not immediately slot into a fixed position within the Tokugawa order. Rather a final settlement only began to emerge after a series of contained conflicts that prompted the company to abandon its usual prerogatives and remake itself in order to meet Tokugawa expectations. Within the confines of these confrontations, the terms of the relationship between the Bakufu and the VOC first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form. As such, these clashes were, to return to an earlier point, essentially productive, although the result was not a mutual convergence on the middle but rather a series of retreats by the weaker party and a shift to new ground.

In each case, the same basic pattern is evident, with initial claims about the company’s rights to diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty triggering a sequence of conflicts that were only resolved by VOC withdrawals, concessions, or outright surrender. This is a story of how the Dutch were defeated by an unstable diplomatic narrative that failed to convince Bakufu officials of the governor-general’s legitimacy and his right to dispatch embassies; of how they found the use of their most reliable tools, including maritime violence, first curtailed then largely prohibited; and of how they struggled to explain and defend colonial possessions in the shadow of powerful Asian states. The result was that the Dutch were compelled over time to abandon their claims to sovereign powers and to refashion themselves—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. By the end of this process of adaptation, the VOC had assumed a very different form in Japan.

To gain some sense of the end result of this process, we can turn back to Gulliver, who alongside his fictional destinations visited one real country. Landing in the port of Shimonoseki on Japan’s main island, Gulliver decides “to disguise my country, and call myself an Hollander, because … the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to enter into that kingdom.”⁵³ Travelling to Edo, he observes the Dutch engaged in the fumi-e, a ritual trampling of a crucifix required of the shogun’s subjects. Rather than being forced into this act of Christian denial by a ruthless despot, they are willing participants, eager to hide any trace of their faith in order to win the shogun’s favor. Bound, as Gulliver was himself in past encounters, to a foreign monarch, they compete to prove their allegiance through conspicuous shows of devotion.

Swift was of course describing a fictional encounter, but his account of the Dutch situation in Japan was rooted in historical fact. The exact materials that he read in preparation for this section of the novel remains a matter of debate, but there are some grounds to believe that the author may have been familiar with Engelbert’s Kaempfer’s History of Japan, which finally appeared in print in England in 1727.⁵⁴ A German physician who worked in Nagasaki for two years from 1690 to 1692, Kaempfer produced one of the most detailed and widely read accounts of the Dutch situation in Japan. Highly critical of his former employers, Kaempfer condemned them as being too ready to bow to the wishes of a heathen ruler. Perhaps the best-known part of the work is his description of the audience given by the shogun to the head (opperhoofd) of the Japan factory:

As soon as the captain appeared, someone shouted in an exaggeratedly loud voice “oranda kapitan” [Holland captain] to prompt him to step forward and pay his respects. Thereupon he crawled forward on his hands and knees between the place where the presents had been lined up and the high seat of his majesty as far as they motioned him. Crouching on his knees, he bent his head to the floor and then, like a lobster, crawled back in this very same position, without one word being exchanged. This short, miserable procedure is all that there is to this famous audience.⁵⁵

While observers like Swift or Kaempfer tended to fixate on the most humiliating details of the fumi-e or the shogunal audience, these were only the most visible symbols of the wider relationship. In Japan, the VOC was constrained within a framework of control that was as complete as any wrapped around a European overseas enterprise in Asia. There the Tokugawa regime succeeded in fencing in the company, constraining its activities and transforming it into an obedient servant that was willing to supply the shogun with military service and a steady flow of intelligence concerning events across the world. By the 1630s the company had, in its representative’s own words, become “a faithful vassal” of the Tokugawa state, with one governor-general declaring, in a particularly hyperbolic flourish, that he and his subordinates stood ready “to act in the service of the shogun and to preserve the Japanese realm with our last drop of blood.”⁵⁶

Language on its own can, of course, be deceptive, and we would be right to be cautious about this kind of overblown rhetoric, which should be familiar to any historian of European expansion more generally. In most cases it served simply to hide a power grab beneath a cloak of local legitimacy. In India, for example, Robert Clive made use of similar rhetoric, when, after his victory at Buxar in 1765, he claimed a position for the English company as the loyal vassal of the Mughal emperor.⁵⁷ Despite these and other proclamations, privileges and power flowed to the English, including the great prize of revenue rights to a number of rich Indian provinces, which rescued Clive’s employers from dire financial straits. In this case, words about service and vassalage concealed the hollowing out of a once powerful Asian state until it was little more than a brittle shell. In Japan, however, this rhetoric of European subordination functioned quite differently. Here, it was the company and not the Tokugawa state that found itself hollowed out as it was stripped of its ability to act and forced to accept a circumscribed position within the Japanese order. In addition to making declarations of loyalty, the VOC was compelled to actually discharge its duties as vassal, sometimes in extremely disconcerting ways. The most dramatic example of this came in 1638 when the company volunteered to serve the shogun by turning its guns against Christian rebels holed up in a ruined fortress at Shimabara.

This process of containment had important consequences for the VOC, which was never in a position to claim the dominant commercial position it had once sought, but also for Japan itself.⁵⁸ The terms of the relationship enabled the Tokugawa state to draw selectively on technology, information, and goods without accepting any of the more damaging side effects that generally accompanied European incursions into Asia. The VOC factory was never Japan’s only window to the world, but it provided an important conduit into the archipelago and one that the company, in its role as loyal vassal, had little choice but to facilitate, even after its own profits dried up. At the same time, the implications of the settlement rippled out more widely, particularly after the translation and publication of Kaempfer’s description of the Dutch position in Japan. Robert Markley notes that Japan “provoked a crisis in seventeenth and eighteenth-century historiography because the defeat of Christianity and the ongoing abjection of the Dutch on Deshima mocked the values and assumptions of Eurocentric ideology.”⁵⁹ For the readers of Kaempfer’s history and other accounts like it, the Dutch position in Japan was a stark reminder of the ongoing power of Asian states and the inability of Europeans to control the terms of international engagements.

While the idea that the Dutch East India Company occupied a particularly weak position in Japan is in no way controversial, and indeed has been well documented both by contemporary writers like Kaempfer as well as by modern scholars, the goal of this study is to show how and why the Dutch ended up where they did in Tokugawa Japan. To do this, it is divided into three parts focused on conflicts over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. Although these overlap chronologically, they have been separated out in order to reveal individual time lines. Part 1 begins with the first diplomatic letter sent to Japan by Victor Sprinckel in 1608 and concludes by looking at the company’s involvement in the Shimabara uprising. By following diplomacy across this period, it traces the full trajectory of interaction and the series of different guises assumed by Dutch representatives in Japan. Part 2 examines privateering campaigns stretching from 1609, when the VOC first arrived in Japan, to 1665, when it agreed to call off its operations against Chinese shipping sailing to the archipelago. The focus is on the company’s largely failed attempt across more than half a century to make use of its superior naval power in the waters around Japan. Part 3 investigates a dispute over sovereignty that commenced in 1624, when the company planted its flag on Tayouan, and closed in the 1630s, after it agreed to hand over the former governor of that colony to Bakufu jurisdiction.

While veritable rivers of ink have been spilt describing Japan’s transformation in order to claim a place in international orders, there was another process of socialization involving the West and Japan that has not received even a fraction of this attention. Although it would be a mistake to minimize the importance of the Meiji moment, it was in fact born out of a fairly short span of European dominance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a far longer period the dynamic was reversed, with Asia occupying a position at the center. Because of this, when an earlier fleet of foreign warships appeared in Japanese harbors in the seventeenth century, it received a very different reception from that afforded to Perry. While the arrival of this first generation of black ships also triggered a process of socialization, it was one in which Europeans were forced to adapt in order to claim a place in a political order that they could do little to alter. To find an accommodation with Tokugawa Japan, Dutch East India Company officials were compelled to accept a set of new rules for proper conduct, as well as a new political vocabulary, and to abandon established practices. In the end, they, like the leaders of Meiji Japan, found a secure place in a foreign order, but discovered that it came at a significant cost.