Japan first became directly integrated into global networks of political power and trade from the sixteenth century, when pirates dominated many of those networks. Yet Japanese political and trade missions quickly stretched across the globe, ranging from Europe to Central and South America to East and Southeast Asia. However, by the early seventeenth century, the Japanese had the military and political power to establish rules for all international contacts, whether Asian or European. After that, these relations changed, if slowly, until the nineteenth century, when the American Commodore Perry forced the Japanese to surrender the control they had until then over their foreign relations. This course examines the changes that occurred between those two points from both Japanese and non-Japanese perspectives. |