一九世紀末葉における英国綿業と東アジア市場

抄録

One of the pivots of the world payments mechanism for the forty years before the First World War was Britain's ability to maintain a deficit on her visible trade with Europe and the United States, a deficit which she balanced by means of a surplus with Asia. This Asian surplus, on visible trade, came largely from exports of Lancashire's cotton textiles to the Asian markets. In India, as early as 1834-35, the Governor General of India reported (quoted in Das Kapital with the source unrecorded):-'The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.' Marx, perhaps with a similar thought in mind, stated in the Communist Manifesto, 'The cheap prices of its (the bourgeoisie's) commodities are the heavy artillery, with which it batters down all Chinese walls.' Under the influence of this sort of view, it has been argued for many years that the importation of British cotton textiles destroyed the handicraft industry in the Far East, or pushed it to the brink of collapse. The present article is an attempt to reassess this traditional view. Some statistical evidence which we present indicates the survival or even the growth of the handicraft weaving industry in the Far East, despite the increase in imports of British textiles. Recent empirical studies on the handicraft industry in each country in the Far East also corroborate this statistical fact. The basic issue then is how the handicraft industry of 'backward' Asia survived the impact of the 'advanced' West. To be more precise, what were the competitive advantages of Far Eastern textiles over British textiles? The traditional view has placed much weight upon relative factor prices, assuming, in its simplest form, a state of perfect competition between two types of textiles. It has not been proved yet, however, if these two cloths were directly competitive in price. Now that the author has collected a series of price data for the major varieties of respective textiles sold upon the Tokyo market, it is possible to re-examine the established view. The result of my price comparison contradicts the prevailing assumption mentioned above. The outcome has also an important implication regarding the position of British textiles in the Far Eastern markets at large, which was indeed similar to that in Japan, i.e., they did not sell well despite their cheaper prices. This was in marked contrast to the Indian textile markets. The population of India was about 260 m. and she consumed about 40 per cent. of the total British exports of cotton textiles. The Far East, on the other hand, where the population was twice as great as that of India, never took more than 15 per cent, of the British exports of textiles. It is clear at least that an explanation in terms of price alone fails to explain why the Far Eastern weavers held their own against British competition. A new explanation is to be explored. Based upon some descriptive evidence, the author tries to establish differences in qualities between British and Far Eastern cotton goods, in particular, cotton yarns. For cotton yarn is a feature by which the quality of cotton textiles are distinguished, and moreover it is subject to an accurate classification by the 'counts' which indicate the fineness of yarn. The counts of yarns typically used in Britain are examined in order to contrast them with those of the Far Eastern yarns. The estimation of the qualities of yarns will be a crucial part of the paper. Our analysis will show that the quality of yarns utilised in the Far East in the late nineteenth century was clearly distinguishable from that of the bulk of cotton yarns manufactured in Britain. The basic distinction in the qualities among British and Far Eastern cotton goods is represented schematically below:- [table] It was the persistent preference of

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)