The Interactive Emergence of Capitalist Trade-Cycle Dynamics in Maritime Asia, 1640s–1760s: Overview and Prospectus

Abstract

The analysis of cyclic movements in overseas trade provides a tool for exploring the emergence of capitalistic dynamics. Regularly recurring cycles of prosperity and recession have been considered a characteristic and novel feature of the modern type of capitalist economy that emerged in the early nineteenth century. In a strong form of this idea, credit-funded cycles of expansion and retrenchment are the basic process through which capitalist development happens. What then should we make of data that suggest the presence of regular cycles, similar in duration to classic industrial-era cycles, in East Asian maritime trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? These preliminary results warrant deeper investigation and provide new support for the idea that capitalist-type developmental dynamics did not simply arrive in eastern Asia from Europe but rather emerged interactively on the spot.