During the second half of the nineteenth century most regions of Asia became colonies of Western powers or were forced to open their ports to foreign trade with them through unequal treaties. As a result Asia's trade with the West grew and Asian economies became more integrated into the world market. The annual average rate of growth of Asia's exports to the West during the period of 1883 to 1913 was 3.2 per cent, which was about the same as the rate of growth of world trade. However, there was also a rapid growth of intra-Asian trade. The rate of growth of intra-Asian trade was probably about 5.4 per cent, much higher than that of Asia's growth of trade as a whole. While the development of export economies, exporting primary' products to the West and importing manufactured goods from there, occurred in Africa and Latin America as well as in Asia, the intra-regional trade of this kind did not develop in other non-Western world, at any rate to such a significant degree. In fact many studies on Africa and Latin America have shown the opposite, i. e. the development of the "enclave" economy only linked with the Western "core" countries without giving linkage effects on other parts of the regional economy. Why then was such a regionwide growth made possible only in Asia? I have tried in this paper to illustrate some features of the growth of intra-Asian trade, to discuss the main factors contributing to it, and to point out the direction of a reinterpretation of Asia's response to the Western impact in a comparative perspective. It is clear that the "engine of growth" of intra-Asian trade was the emergence of the modern cotton industry in India and in Japan, as it stimulated the cotton trade on many levels; exports of Indian raw cotton to Japan, exports of Indian and Japanese yarn to China, exports of Japanese cotton manufacture and "sundries" to China etc. Such a growth of cotton trade led to an international specialization on an Asian scale, and opened up new market opportunities for primary producers. Rice producers in South-east Asia were among those who responded to them. Thus there emerged an Asian internatinal division of labour with Japan and India as exporters of manufactured goods and importers of primary products on the one hand, and China and South-east Asia as exporters of primary products and importers of manufactured goods on the other. The nature of intra-Asian trade described above was essentially an "autonomous" one in the sense that most of the production, distribution and consumptinn involved were planned and carried out by Asians themselves. The Western impact, however, was also essential to the growth of intra-Asian trade in some respects. First, the development of export economies in Asia gave a major market for both Asian-made manufactured goods and primary products. Certainly the larger proportions of cotton manufacture and rice were consumed by those engaged in the production of primary products to be exported to the West. To that extent the growth of intra-Asian trade should be interpreted as a result of the final demand linkage effect of Asia's trade with the West. Second, most of the manufactured goods which served for the development of an infrastructure such as railways, ports and cities were imported from the West, without which the intra-Asian trade would have been confined to a centuries-old junk trade. Third, most Asian countries had adopted the gold standard by the end of the nineteenth century so that, while the relative "autonomy" of the silver-using area was lost, capital imports of manufactured goods from the West became easier. Japan's entry to the international gold standard in 1897 confirmed the fact that Asia needed closer contact with the West to develop its own reginal trade network. Most of the literature on Asian economic history have

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