ヨーロッパのアジア進出と明治維新 : イギリスとの関係を中心として

The objective of this research is to clarify what status Japan needed to enter into the modern world at the time of modernization. The proposed methodology is to use the British documents and Japanese documents at the end of the Edo period, in the middle of the19th Century. This article revealed as follows:
The British diplomatic policy at the time was the Imperialism of Free Trade. Britain regarded Japan as a “less civilized” nation and tried to exploit it economically. When the British government made a trade treaty with Japan, they believed the Tokugawa government was sovereign. They realized later that the Japanese Emperor was the sovereign, but they officially dealt with the Tokugawa as the sovereign in order to develop trade with Japan. At the same time, Britain sought to trade with Japanese lords.
Japanese people felt an increased a sense of crisis from colonization by European countries when China lost the Opium war with Britain, and they tried to maintain independency by taking the war of American independence as an ideal model. The Choshu clan first recovered the honor of the Japanese nation by excluding foreign countries; then they would open their nation positively with equal status to European countries in order to maintain independency. The Satsuma clan tried to enter into foreign trade positively and started to trade with a British company in Shanghai.