Vol. 71, No. 6

Masataka SETOBAYASHI
Distribution of raw cotton in the middle and upper Yangtze Valley in late Qing and early Republican China

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the change in the Chinese local economy, which gradually entered the world economy through the expansion of the raw cotton trade. The paper focuses on the distribution of raw cotton in the middle and upper Yangtze Valley during the period between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

The demand for raw cotton increased to a great degree from the 1890s because of the development of the cotton-spinning industry in East Asia, especially in Japan and Shanghai. From the 1900s, however, long-staple American cotton became a much more important variety in the East Asian market than short-staple native cotton. Thus the traditional cotton-growing area in the middle Yangtze Valley started cultivating the American variety along with the native type.

These two kinds of raw cotton had different markets. The American variety was supplied to the Japanese as well as the Shanghai markets, whereas the native variety was mainly supplied to the local market, such as the upper Yangtze Valley. This shows that with transformations in the world economy the cotton-growing area in the middle Yangtze Valley responded to the two different types of markets, the local and the East Asian markets.

Natsuko KITANI
The Lancashire-Bombay talks and the Indo-Japanese trade negotiations with regard to Indian export of raw cotton: reconsideration of imperial preference in India in the first half of the 1930s

This paper considers the impact of the imperial preference system on economic relations between Britain and India in the 1930s. Most of the literature to date has considered the Indo-British and Anglo-Japanese trade agreements in terms of British exports of cotton goods to India. By contrast, this paper focuses on fiscal issues and on the problems of Indian raw cotton exports.

Revenue issues were an important consideration during the trade negotiations. Despite the granting of preferences, the Indian exchequer could raise more revenue from tariffs on British cotton imports than from Japanese cotton imports, except for plain cotton cloth. This meant that it was reasonable to retain imperial preference for fiscal reasons. Indian exports of raw cotton also played a key role. The conclusion of the Lees-Mody Pact of 1933 and the Indo-Japanese Trade Agreement of 1934, which admitted imperial preference and guaranteed British purchases of Indian cotton, secured the revenue base of the Indian government through tariffs on cotton imports and earnings from the export of primary goods. Thus the threat posed by Japanese competition set the parameters for discussion in the Indo-British trade relationship in the first half of the 1930s.

Takashi ITO
Tensions between science and commerce at nineteenth-century London Zoo

This paper explores the implications of the early development of London Zoo, which thrived as a fashionable metropolitan resort in the Victorian era. Its commercial success presented problems to the governing body, the Zoological Society of London. Although the society had been defined as a scientific institution, the commercial nature of public entertainment provided by the zoo undermined this assumption. Generating as well as indulging public demands for ‘zoological entertainment’, the society confronted growing tensions between its scientific identity and the alleged moneymaking activities of the zoo business. Accordingly, debates arose, first within the society, eventually at the law court, concerning how the society’s public rationale should be justified. The paper concludes that the scientific society, the public, the government, the judiciary, and local authorities, all played their parts in the commercialisation of leisure, often with competing prospects of its benefit. It was their entangled engagements that brought forth the hybrid offspring of science and commerce.

Shigeomi TAKADA
Establishment of the factory system in the flour-milling industry in Budapest: introduction of modern technology and formation of the capitalist-worker relationship

The task of this article is to describe the establishment process of the factory system in the flour-milling industry in Budapest, which subsequently became a leading industry during the Industrial Revolution in Hungary in the 19th century.

Pest Cylinder Flour Mill, founded in 1839, laid the grounds for the mechanical milling industry in Hungary. Later, from the second half of the 1860s, with a rush of over 10 new steam mill companies established, the milling industry in Budapest formed a monopolistic industrial structure and became a modern industry.

In the late 1880s, roller mills replaced the millstone in the grinding process, and today’s production system, in which corn is processed into flour through a succession of operations in one factory, was established.

The capitalist-worker relationship in the mechanical milling industry was instituted through the simultaneous formations of the milling industrialists association and the mutual aid association for milling workers in the late 1880s.

From the technical and the social points of view, it can be said that the milling industry in Budapest had established the factory system by the end of the 1880s.