Scholarly interest in the origins of modern Japanese economic growth in the mid- to late nineteenth century remains strong. As is well known, Japan then became the first non-Western nation to industrialize. Its transition from tightly restricting foreign trade to becoming a major trading nation within a half-century was remarkable. Yasuhiro Makimura's Yokohama and the Silk Trade joins Catherine L. Phipps's Empires on the Waterfront: Japan's Ports and Power, 1858–1899 (2015) as the second recent English-language monograph to examine this transformation. While Phipps focuses on Moji and other ports not opened by trade treaties with Western nations in the mid-nineteenth century, Makimura concentrates on the major treaty port of Yokohama.

The author skillfully blends interpretive analysis with detailed case studies of individual Japanese merchants in a lucidly organized study based on careful scholarship. Each chapter summarizes its major points and explains how they contribute to the book's main arguments. Makimura utilizes numerous primary sources as well as secondary works. The focus on the early commerce in raw silk between Japan and Western nations helps to fill a gap in the English-language literature about this traditional sector, which produced Japan's major export from the 1860s through the 1920s. Moreover, this volume is the first book-length monograph in English on Yokohama, which after 1858 quickly became the hub of Japanese trade with Western nations.

The author also advocates a new regional approach to analyzing economic trends in nineteenth-century Japan. The first two substantive chapters argue cogently that during the last decades of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) the divergence of economic development in the eastern region, near the government's administrative capital of Edo (after 1868, Tokyo), from trends in the western region, near the port of Osaka, made officials more amenable toward expanding foreign trade. The western region prospered through shipping various goods to the rapidly growing market in Edo, but the eastern region stagnated. The population in the West grew while that in the East contracted. Therefore, by the 1850s some officials, such as Masayoshi Hotta and Tadanari Iwase, were ready to consider expanding Japan's foreign trade to increase revenue for the Tokugawa government centered in eastern Japan. When Townsend Harris, the first American consul to Japan, arrived to negotiate a trade treaty, Hotta and Iwase negotiated a pact in the hope that more international trade would enhance the government's power by making the eastern region the center of the national economy. In contrast to the standard view that American pressure imposed a treaty on Japanese leaders in 1858, Makimura argues that Japanese leaders who approved the new pact viewed it as serving domestic purposes. Its creation was “as much a Japanese story . . . as it was an American or western story” (p. 63).

The heart of this book lies in the next four chapters, which examine the stunning rise of Yokohama after 1858 from a small fishing village to the major port for handling exports of raw silk. Portraits of several individual merchants reveal the pivotal role of adventurous entrepreneurs in pioneering this international trade. With no precedents to follow, they had to gain permission from the government to set up shop in the city and develop their own networks of peasant producers and foreign merchants. In this volatile environment, success could be ephemeral. Jūbei Nakaiya, who quickly became the richest merchant in the city, faced financial ruin just two years later because he attempted to evade government regulations. Although Japanese merchants had to take great risks in speculatively buying and selling goods, the government provided no means to enforce contracts to do so. Moreover, profits increasingly depended on unpredictable trends in global markets. Some innovations succeeded, such as the effort in the 1880s of Rioichiro Arai and Chōtarō Hoshino to sell Japanese silk directly in America, and some experiments flopped, such as the expeditions sent by silk producers from Gunma prefecture to sell cards of silkworm eggs in Italy.

Makimura applies his regional approach to explain the national and international significance of the sudden prosperity of Yokohama and its “hinterland” that produced raw silk. Concentrating on the direction of the flows of goods and money, he argues that the foreign demand for exports of raw silk, especially in the United States, spurred the expansion of silk production in eastern Japan and that the money earned by those exports supported a growing market there for cotton textiles manufactured in western Japan, which became the center of a modern cotton-spinning industry. Hence, the silk trade through Yokohama spurred Japan's industrialization in both regions. Completing the “global loop,” the author extends this model internationally by positing that when Japanese cotton spinners purchased raw cotton from the British colony of India, those funds flowed to Britain, where investors used them to invest in the United States (p. 220). This is an interesting and plausible model that needs further exploration. Clearly, American demand for raw silk helped spark the growth of silk production in Japan, but other points need more evidence. Data that indicate the importance of the market in eastern Japan for the development of the cotton-spinning sector in western Japan would be helpful, as would data that show that revenue derived from Japanese purchases of Indian cotton ended up in the hands of British businessmen who then invested in the United States.

One noteworthy theme that emerges by the end of the book is the contingency of Japan's modern economic development. For example, Makimura suggests that if different Japanese officials had been in charge during the 1850s, the government might have denied American demands for trade. If in the 1860s a silkworm disease had not spread in Europe, or if the American silk textile manufacturing sector had not expanded so quickly, Japanese exports would have grown more slowly.

If a few points need elaboration, overall Yokohama and the Silk Trade presents important insights into the complex dynamics of the development of foreign trade in modern Japan as resulting from the interaction of individual merchants, regional economies, national policies, and changing global contexts.