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

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The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan . By Adam Clulow . Columbia Studies in International and Global History, New York : Columbia University Press , 2014. Pp. 352. ISBN 10: 0231164289 ; ISBN 13: 978-0231164283 .

Book Reviews

Adam Clulow's first monograph adds to the distinguished cross-disciplinary research which he has presented in history and area studies journals over the past decade. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan summarizes his transnational scholarship on piracy, maritime trade patterns and diplomacy in the China Sea region in the first half of the seventeenth century. The book moreover offers innumerable new insights into related topics such as the political administration of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Tokugawa Bakufu's foreign policies and Southeast Asian debuts in international relations. Illustrating the company's clashes with and its ultimate surrender to Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence and sovereignty, he shows how the Dutch succumbed to the demands of the Bakufu for the sake of durable access to Japan. This stands in clear contrast to the company's image as an unrelenting organization, which frequently used its military apparatus elsewhere in Asia.

Clulow's approach of combining micro-historical details with big questions partly strikes a chord with the scholarship of Tonio Andrade and Robert I. Hellyer.¹This impressive survey undoubtedly benefitted from both the author's analytical strength and from a thorough engagement with Dutch and Japanese sources (i.e. various Dagregister editions, the Ikoku Nikki and records of the Dainihon Shiryo). A clear focus on diverse actors and a remarkably eloquent writing style including lively anecdotes and expressive figurative language characterize his revisionist story telling, an accomplishment which deserves special mention considering that Clulow was faced with the translation of antiquated classical Japanese records and unpolished Dutch scripts into modern English.

What makes the survey of further value is the new insights into the company's political administration, its operating institutions and how its members mastered challenging environments. Given the scarcity of publications beyond the company's commercial and maritime strategies, Clulow's findings prove historians of the European expansion in Asia (including the review author), who used to think that they knew how the VOC functioned, wrong.

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