Early Japanese Trade, Administration and Interactions with the West

Throughout his academic career Louis Cullen's main research interest has been foreign trade - originally that of England, Ireland and France, but from the mid-1990s, his focus turned to Japanese history resulting in his critically acclaimed A history of Japan 1582-1941: Internal and External Worlds. Subsequently, he concentrated on the analysis of archival sources and of the problems they pose for the interpretation of Japanese history: papers on some of these themes and their associated statistical dimensions have appeared in Nichibunken's Japan Review and are republished here together with a collection of other papers including interpreting Tokugawa history and the knowledge and the use of Japanese by the Dutch on Dejima island.

Louis M. Cullen is professor emeritus of modern Irish history, Trinity College, Dublin, and was a visiting scholar in 2002-3 in the International Research Centre in Japanese Studies in Kyoto. He is the author of A History of Japan 1582-1941: Internal and External Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2003). His main research interest has been in international trade including a major work Anglo-Irish Trade 1660-1800 in 1968 and books on the French brandy trade in 1998 and 2002 (French translations in 2002 and 2006). His work in the last decade in Japanese history has concerned administration, archives and statistics for both populatiom and trade, on which he has published papers in the Japan Review (International Research Centre in Japanese Studies).