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Chapter IX
The Creation of a Modern State
By the middle of the nineteenth century, political and social changes were long overdue in Japan. Since the political system had been basically reactionary even in the early seventeenth century, it was by now more than two hundred years out of date. The growth of nationalism and the development of a full-fledged commercial economy had made Japan ready for an entirely new political and social order. But so well had the early Tokugawa succeeded in creating a system capable of preserving political stability that the machine was still running relatively smoothly. It took an outside force to disrupt it. This force was provided by the Europeans, who came not only from Europe but also from their newer homes in America.
In the last years of the eighteenth century the Russians, who had crossed the vast land expanse of Siberia and reached the Pacific, began to attempt to establish contacts with the Japanese. At about the same time the English, who had supplanted the Portuguese and Spanish as the chief mariners and traders in Far Eastern