The Company and the Shogun

The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan

Adam Clulow

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535731
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Japon

The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process.

This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. Within the confines of these conflicts, the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form.

The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company in Japan as something more than just a commercial organization, The Company and the Shogun presents new perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting relationships to develop between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise.

1

Diplomacy

CHAPTER ONE

ROYAL LETTERS FROM THE REPUBLIC

I have come here … because of the command of the King of Holland.

—Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge, 1607

In 1609 two ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company arrived in Hirado in western Japan. After dropping anchor in the port’s narrow harbor, the leaders of the expedition prepared to dispatch a small group of representatives to seek an audience with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of a military government then approaching the anniversary of its first decade in power. Some accounts of the Dutch in Japan reference a letter from Prince Maurits, a high-ranking Dutch aristocrat, but its purpose and why a delegation belonging to an independent mercantile company based in a republic would have transported such a document to Japan is left unexplained, making it seem little more than a historical footnote.¹ According to most descriptions of what happened next, the Dutch, private merchants interested only in trade and without any particular diplomatic pretensions, were well received by a friendly shogun who swiftly granted all their requests.² In this way the moment of first contact is typically presented as an uncomplicated interaction, an easy meeting of minds between the shogun and the company’s men that, despite the fact the VOC was an unfamiliar interloper into Asian politics, required little mediation or additional explanation.

This tendency to gloss over European diplomatic activity as an essentially straightforward process of negotiation is not limited to Japan. After their ships dropped anchor, whether in tiny port polities or on the maritime fringes of powerful states, commanders from da Gama onward invariably sought access to the highest authority in the land by dispatching embassies armed with official letters and bearing gifts. From the beginning, therefore, the embassy was a fundamental instrument for expansion, but while historians have long been interested in the ways in which Europeans broke into Asian commercial networks, there are far fewer studies detailing the nature of their diplomatic engagements. The result has been that, even after the pioneering work of scholars like Jack Wills, we know considerably less about the challenges faced by European ambassadors than we do about the struggles of European merchants to master the difficult trading environment they found in Asia.³

While some ambassadors were extremely successful, the complexity of the diplomatic circuits into which they demanded access—networks that could be just as intricate, incomprehensible, and resistant to penetration as any commercial system—should not be underestimated. An examination of the documents produced by ambassadors reveals that the process of diplomatic engagement with Asian states was a far trickier affair than it sometimes appears and one that routinely generated problems for European enterprises. In the same way as European merchants found they had nothing to sell, European ambassadors frequently discovered they were ill-prepared to participate in the business of diplomacy in Asia. Staffed with poorly qualified personnel, equipped with inappropriate gifts or problematic documents, and armed with unrealistic aims, many embassies struggled to make headway. There was, to put it more plainly, nothing straightforward about diplomacy, particularly in the initial phase of interaction when Europeans attempted to establish a presence in Asia.

In recent years this point has been well illustrated by scholars such as Richmond Barbour who have analyzed the trials and tribulations faced by early English diplomats in India.⁴ One of the more persistent difficulties illuminated by such research concerns the various ways in which ambassadors attached to the English East India Company struggled to persuade anyone that their monarch, the putative figurehead for the organization’s diplomatic efforts, should be viewed as something more than, to quote one Mughal official, a “pettie prince” deserving of little respect in the grand courts that dominated the region.⁵

Such studies raise an obvious question as to the fate of their VOC counterparts. The fact that the Dutch emerged from a republic has prompted some scholars to suggest that the VOC and its forerunner organizations enjoyed a unique advantage that enabled their representatives to maneuver easily in their negotiations with Asian states. In her study of the company’s activities in India, Ann Radwan argues that the Dutch were distinctly fortunate as the nature of their home state meant that they were not called upon to constantly defend a distant monarch’s honor.⁶ While there were certainly some circumstances in which this may have been the case, there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that the republican background was often more handicap than advantage.

As the employees of a company of merchants led by merchants, VOC officials struggled to explain what exactly they represented and why a private organization was so determined to gain entrance into diplomatic circuits that were conventionally monopolized by states. To further complicate the matter, the company could not simply look toward Europe to borrow legitimacy from the sovereign there. Occupying an uncertain position within Europe itself, the Dutch Republic was a political experiment ruled by an unruly parliament and lacking a monarch, the one readily translatable figure that could be inserted into diplomatic negotiations. The combination of these facts meant that while all Europeans struggled to navigate diplomatic circuits, the Dutch, precisely because of the nature of their home state, faced a particularly thorny problem when it came to crafting an acceptable narrative for consumption in courts across Asia. Their way round this problem brings us back to the 1609 delegation and to the letter it carried from Prince Maurits.

When this small group of envoys traveled to meet with the shogun, they did so not as private merchants seeking entry into a category that came to be known by Tokugawa officials as tsūsho, or commercial relations, but as ambassadors who claimed to represent the “king of Holland,” a fictive sovereign built around a carefully blurred vision of Prince Maurits.⁷ The introduction of this figure offered a kind of royal disguise that could be draped over the company’s activities, thereby obscuring the unfamiliar nature of the organization, while also smoothing the way for diplomatic interaction by boosting the status of Dutch envoys and providing them with a ready framework for exchange. It had the added effect of postponing any clash over the company’s diplomatic ambitions, which were effectively concealed from view until a later period when, as detailed in the next chapter, the VOC chose to engage with the shogun without the mediation of a royal figurehead. The aim of this chapter is to put the “king of Holland” back into the story of the Dutch encounter with the Tokugawa Bakufu by looking at what VOC representatives actually said (or wrote) and by assuming that such statements carried weight. When envoys explained that they came from the “king of Holland,” this was not an accident of translation or a kind of diplomatic garnish loosely sprinkled over something more substantial. Instead, as the Tokugawa records make clear, it provided both structure and logic to the first phase of negotiations between the company and the shogun.

EUROPEAN AMBASSADORS IN ASIA

The European enterprises that moved into Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all struggled to find the right keys to unlock the varied diplomatic circuits they encountered across the region. When Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut in 1498, he immediately dispatched a missive to the local ruler “informing him that an ambassador had arrived from the king of Portugal with letters.”⁸ Taking on the identity of royal representative, he presented himself as a kingly proxy charged by the sovereign to make contact with potentates in Asia. Although da Gama was prone to exaggerations about Portuguese power, this representation of himself and his role was rooted in fact. As was the case with Columbus’s voyage, his expedition had been authorized and bankrolled by a crown eager to secure the riches of Asian trade. Unlike the mercantile companies that eclipsed it in the seventeenth century, the Estado da India, the primary vehicle for Portuguese expansion into Asia, was a centrally controlled enterprise. Because of this, every Portuguese subject who ventured east “did so in the service of the Crown,” although most sought to supplement their salaries by engaging in private trade on their own account.⁹

After the first meeting in Calicut, dozens of Portuguese ambassadors fanned out across Asia in a burst of activity that took them, in the space of just a few decades, from the shores of India to the Chinese court. Like their famous predecessor, these envoys relied on the distant presence of the king in Europe to provide both legitimacy for their missions and a framework for exchange. Delegations traveled under royal banners, carried documents marked with the king’s seal, and presented portraits of the monarch.¹⁰ The outlines of the subsequent offer also remained largely consistent. In 1498 da Gama had explained that “he had been instructed to say by word of mouth that … [the king of Portugal] desired to be … [the ruler of Calicut’s] friend and brother.”¹¹ In subsequent negotiations with a range of sovereigns, ambassadors consistently offered the king’s “friendship” (amizade) and “brotherhood” (irmandade) in return for political alliances and trading concessions.¹² Both concepts were freighted with meaning; brotherhood “signified an imaginary blood relationship with spiritual overtones,” a way to make connections across cultures by establishing a league of sympathetic monarchs joined together for a common purpose, while friendship came with its own set of mutual obligations.¹³ In this way the notion of a personal connection between monarchs, something possible across great distances and without any requirement for face-to-face contact, provided an organizing structure for exchange and a coherent logic for subsequent interactions.

Although it offered a valuable framework for communication, the reliance on the king as the key to diplomatic exchange created its own complications. The most common problem lay in persuading anyone to take the Portuguese sovereign seriously. Ambassadors struggled to reconcile their grand claims about the power of their overlord and the desirability of his friendship with the humble and at times desperately shoddy appearance of their embassies. The chasm between claim and appearance was laid bare as early as 1498 when the king of Calicut noted that da Gama “had told him that he came from a very rich kingdom, and yet had brought him nothing.”¹⁴ Using royal brotherhood as an instrument for cross-cultural interaction could also backfire when it was introduced to sovereigns like the emperor of China who, presiding over a hierarchical system of relations that ascended through assorted levels of barbarians to the center of civilization in the imperial capital, was prone to reject any notion of equivalence with a minor potentate in Europe.

But, for all these problems, the Portuguese presentation did have the great merit of simplicity. In contrast, the English merchants that started to appear in Asian port cities in the seventeenth century arrived in the service of a far more complex sponsor. Like its Dutch counterpart, the English East India Company was a private mercantile corporation organized, bankrolled, and populated by merchants, who operated independently of the state. Its agents were thus, to use George Masselman’s phrase, “in the employ of anonymous capital” rather than a monarch.¹⁵ How then to represent an autonomous organization controlled by a governing body made up of more than twenty individuals?¹⁶ The obvious solution, adopted swiftly and without apparent dispute, was to paper over the organization’s independent character by borrowing legitimacy from the crown. As they fitted out their first vessels for an expedition to Asia, the organizing committee resolved to solicit letters “from the Queen, to the princes and potentates in India, this being held to be the most obvious expedient for insuring a favorable reception.”¹⁷ The reasoning was clear: if the Company’s employees did not actually represent the English crown, in this case Queen Elizabeth, they could at least graft the monarch’s name and prestige onto their endeavors, thereby gaining access where it would otherwise be denied.¹⁸

When James Lancaster, the commander of this first expedition, arrived in Aceh, a powerful maritime kingdom located on the northern tip of Sumatra that would also welcome ambassadors from the “king of Holland,” in 1602, he made full use of his letters from the queen, quickly assuming the role of ambassador and relying on a logic of royal contact to explain his presence. Brought before the sultan, he “made his obeysance after the manner of the country, declaring that hee was sent from the most mightie Queene of England to congratulate with his highnesse and treat with him concerning a peace and amitie with his Maiestie.”¹⁹ The letter itself, addressed from “Elizabeth by the Grace of God, Queene of England, France, and Ireland…. To the great and mightie King of Achem, &c. in the Island of Sumatra, our loving Brother,” began with an immediate invocation of brotherhood between sovereigns.²⁰ It went on to offer the “friendship and league” between equivalent rulers as a framework for relations between the Acehnese and the English company’s merchants. These ties of amity, once accepted, were to produce a defined set of privileges for Elizabeth’s subjects in Asia and hence to engineer an advantageous trading position.²¹

As it had in the Portuguese case, the reliance on a monarch gave clear benefits while also creating a separate set of not insubstantial problems. The crown was at best a fair weather friend, often eager to help but occasionally working actively against the company’s interests by allowing rival merchants into its area of operations.²² More significantly, overlaying a thin covering of royal prestige onto a private commercial enterprise could sometimes hurt more than it helped, engendering a palpable sense of uncertainty and confusion that could undermine diplomatic missions.²³ Royal letters were occasionally handed to hastily conscripted merchants who were poorly equipped to play the part of royal ambassador. When one Mr. Edwards, an unfortunate figure described by his compatriots as a “mecannycal fellowe,” assumed the “title and state of an ambassador” to India in 1614, the result was disastrous.²⁴ After he behaved “himselfe not as beseeminge an ambassador, especiallye sente from soe worthye and greate a prince as the Kinge of England,” he was “kicked and spurned by the [Mughal] King’s porters out of the courte-gates, to the unrecoverable disgrace of our Kinge and nation.”²⁵

Although there were failures along the way, the introduction of the monarch provided, particularly in the first phase of contact, a vital enabling mechanism for English representatives in Asia. More than simply raising the status of individual envoys, it offered both a structure and a language for exchange. Like their English counterparts, Dutch ambassadors in Asia were also employees of an independent mercantile organization, but their republican background meant that they lacked a monarch capable of being drafted immediately into service as an obvious figurehead.

THE DUTCH PROBLEM

The Dutch Republic, also known as the United Provinces, was born in the midst of a bitter struggle with the armies of Habsburg Spain.²⁶ Commencing in 1568 when a number of provinces in the northern Netherlands revolted against Phillip II (r. 1556–98), the conflict continued unbroken, except for a truce between 1609 and 1621, for the next eighty years until 1648. Over the course of the long struggle with Spa...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Archival Sources
• Introduction: Taming the Dutch
• 1. Diplomacy
• 2. Violence
• 3. Sovereignty
• Conclusion: The Dutch Experience in Japan
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index