(a.1) One of Leonard Blusse’s convincing arguments in “Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans” is that government intervention and restriction in the trade of early modern states was detrimental to their economies. He uses general economic fluctuations in early modern Asian countries along with the port city of Batavia in Indonesia to demonstrate this. Blusse argues that the economic relations between Asian countries have only been studied through the view of the tributary system. By doing so, historians have narrow insight on the actual relations. They are looking at the relations as they “should be” rather than how they were.
In reality, trade flourished in Asian countries when governments gave autonomy to private traders and loosened their maritime bans. Prior to the seventeenth century, China and Japan exercised much restraint over foreign trade in their regimes. These countries soon had to adjust to the global changes in trade, as the maritime prohibitions caused the economy to diminish and problems to occur. The author…show more content… Out of the three government administrations in this quote, Blusse argues that Dutch intervention in Batavia was particularly detrimental. Batavia was under Dutch colonial rule during its time as the “Queen of the Orient” , or the most important international trade port in Asia. As such, the Dutch East India Trading Company (VOC) had full control over the tariffs and on the regulations of trade. Because of this the fluctuation of Batavia’s trade and economy heavily depended on the strength of the VOC. Blusse argues that Batavia became the “Cemetery of the East” because of the VOC’s absolute control over the port city. The failure of Batavia coincided with the dissolution of the VOC in
