This study provides a political and economic examination of the impact of the silk trade on nineteenth-century Japan. It analyzes the role of Japan’s eastern interior region and the port of Yokohama and argues that the growth of the silk industry was largely responsible for the integration of Japan into the global economy.

This study provides a broad political and economic examination of the impact of the silk trade on nineteenth-century Japan. It analyzes the economic role of Japan’s eastern interior region and that of the port of Yokohama. It argues that the economic development in this period laid the foundations for Japan’s prewar industrial development in the late nineteenth century and was largely responsible for the integration of Japan into the global economy.