The effect of the arrival of Commodore Perry to Japanese shores in 1853 has been widely debated among scholars of Japanese history. Some argue that the moment marked the “opening” of Japan to the wider world after two centuries of isolation under the ruling Tokugawa regime. From this perspective, the establishment of five treaty ports for foreign trade in 1858 at Hakodate, Yokohama, Kōbe, Niigata, and Nagasaki sparked the internationalization and, soon, the industrialization of the Japanese state and economy. More recently, others, wary of the binary of West-modern-open/East-traditional-closed that the narrative of “opening” implies, have argued that Japan had a vibrant culture of commerce and exchange with other East Asian nations despite the Tokugawa regime’s doctrine of seclusion. These works direct our attention to the extant practices of foreign relations and non-official exchange that permeated Tokugawa society from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. From this latter perspective, Perry’s arrival necessitated the recalibration of commercial pathways, state policies and diplomatic practices and regimes of production to match the new terms of the international system.

Catherine L. Phipps’ Empires on the Waterfront builds on this latter approach to nineteenth-century Japanese history to argue that the Japanese state, entrepreneurs and local officials used ports and maritime trade to transform Japan into a regional power between the opening of the treaty ports in 1858 and the renegotiation of the unequal treaties in 1899. The main problem that Phipps addresses is how Japanese actors on a variety of scales adapted the territory under their control to the new demands of international commerce. Phipps argues that the answer lies in the proliferation of “special trading ports”, a previously unexamined element of Japan’s modern transition. Special trading ports were controlled by the Japanese government, in contrast to the “treaty ports”, which were governed by Japan’s unequal treaties with Western powers. The unequal treaties denied the Japanese government tariff autonomy and granted foreigners the right of extraterritoriality. Japanese officials were well aware of the deleterious effects of these provisions, especially that of the inability to set protective tariffs, through the example of China, which had been transformed into an informal colony of the Western powers by this same mechanism. Working proactively, Japanese government and local authorities developed a counter-mechanism, the special trading ports, which operated outside of the jurisdiction of the unequal treaties and whose terms of trade could therefore be controlled by the Japanese government.

Through this novel approach to the history of Japan’s modern transition, Phipps shows how local actors and state officials built up Japan’s commercial power in East Asia by using special trading ports to exchange commodities with Western shippers and businesses in Chinese and other East Asian treaty ports. As Phipps argues, persuasively, these trade relations, particularly those in coal, succeeded in large part by building on the infrastructure and industry of informal imperialism that British, American, Russian and German empires had established in East Asia during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The book divides the study of special trading ports into three parts. Each part corresponds to one of three scales of the analysis. The first part, “Japan in the World”, argues that the Tokugawa and Meiji governments selected the location of treaty ports and, later, special trading ports with an eye toward solidifying the authority of the central government—first, the teetering Tokugawa regime and later the new modern government. Here, the argument parallels that of earlier scholarship on the history of Japan’s railways, which has shown that government leaders explicitly endeavoured to construct a “national” rather than “colonial” railway network as they built the country’s first trunk lines. The two chapters in this section trace the history of the opening of the ports, and the central government’s increasing management of the export trade of key commodities, such as coal and rice, through special trading ports.

The second part, “Ports in the Nation”, explores more fully how local entrepreneurs partnered with major national and foreign enterprises to ensure that local regions would benefit from these new patterns of trade. Chapter Three shows how the rise of Japan as a regional power at the end of the nineteenth century was based on the development of a robust maritime trade infrastructure through a case study of the port of Moji, in Kyūshū. Moji became the main port for the export of Japanese coal to East Asia, especially to the treaty port of Shanghai. Chapter Four addresses the stumbling blocks that necessarily attended such a dramatic change in infrastructure and circulation. From labour disputes, human trafficking, and smuggling to (most fascinatingly) an international dispute over whether the “Inland Sea” (the stretch of water between the islands of Shikoku and Honshū) should be considered Japanese or international waters, Phipps shows that the Japanese government and merchants operated within the “paradox of informal imperialism”—in Phipps’ words, that “Japan could be a dependent and vulnerable semi-colony at the same time that it benefited from mutual accommodation, a degree of autonomy, and growing strength to launch its own imperialist pursuits” (153).

The final part, “Moji in the Empire”, returns to the port of Moji in Kyūshū, the special trading port that most benefited from the government’s policy of managed international commerce. Chapter Five explores how denizens of this region came to understand their place in the new national space of Japan during the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) through the commercialization of information (news of the war arrived in Moji sooner than anywhere else in the country by virtue of Moji’s role as the central gateway for military trans-shipment to the continent) and the construction of new national infrastructure (military prisons, hospitals, and warehouses). Chapter Six concludes the chronological narrative by showing how members of the Japanese Diet used liberal arguments about the progressive nature of free trade to argue for the opening of Japan’s special trading ports to unrestricted import and export trade.

Overall, Empires on the Waterfront offers a unique look at how Japanese officials and businessmen managed Japan’s transition to independence by shaping the tools of informal imperialism to suit their own ends. Specialists in Japanese history will find that the book provides a detailed history of special trading ports and the early decades of the modern maritime trade—both neglected areas of English-language scholarship. Though the discussion of special trading ports alone makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the period, some readers might wish for more discussion of how Japanese officials, elites, and entrepreneurs debated the problem of integrating Japan into a new spatial order. The category of “Japanese” is strangely flat. Further attention to how the Tokugawa regime’s approach to the problem of space, economy, and power differed from that of the modern Meiji government, or to how groups of different political persuasions debated how best to integrate (or not) Japan within the new space of international geopolitics and exchange, would be welcome. At the minimum, Empires on the Waterfront raises important questions about this issue that should spark further research.

For non-specialists, Empires on the Waterfront shows how “change of location” (Karl Marx via David Harvey) came to be an important commodity in and of itself that states sought to govern in the late nineteenth century. In the case of Japan, the unequal treaties created special risks (e.g., informal imperialism) and special opportunities (e.g., the chance to take advantage of other East Asian treaty ports and imperial trade networks) that shaped the rise of Japan as a modern state and regional hegemon. Such a process involved both the differentiation and integration of ports into new national networks, and the differentiation and integration of these national networks into a new international space. Though the book does not engage the extant scholarship on the re-spatialization of the globe that attended the expansion of capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century, it does offer a case study of the messy process by which this new spatial order emerged in East Asia.