Indo-Japan Cooperative Ventures in Match Manufacturing in India: Muslim Merchant Networks in and Beyond the Bengal Bay Region 1900–1930

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of Indian merchants, especially Muslims, in the match trade between Japan and India, and situates the cooperative ventures set up in the middle of the 1920s between Indian merchants and Japanese manufacturers in the context of the economy of the Bengal Bay region. Their inter-regional networks and partnerships were important not just for trade, but also for manufacturing based on the flow of technology, ideas, information, and natural resources. The paper also shows that such ventures unexpectedly caused conflicts with movements in India to promote domestic industry and with the logic of territorial nationalism that lay behind them.

Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan

“…4 By 1930, there were over thirty Indian businesses operating in Yokohama. 5 Judging by their trading and owner names, none of these companies were run by Muslim merchants, though in his travel diary Ross Mas'ud did mention the presence of one Muslim trading house, 'Abdul Karim Bros. (Masood [1922] 1968, 63) and we know that Kobe was home to a good number of Indian Muslim merchants by this period (Oishi 2004).…”

“…Whether published in Delhi, Istanbul, or Tehran, their texts did not present Japan in the practical terms of the diplomatic ally or trading partner. The Ottoman and Iranian governments had in any case received Japanese embassies as early as 1880, and both Indian and Iranian merchants were already operating in Japan by that decade (Markovits 2000, 141-47;Oishi 2004;Sahhafbashi 1985). While the data that appeared in these trans-Islamic travelogues was in most cases factually accurate, it was nonetheless selective.…”

Shared infrastructures, informational asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan,c.1890–1930

“…81 As an exporter of leather, Mirza 'Ali Raza was, of course, a businessman and it was to other such Indian Muslim businessmen that he introduced Mas'ud, such as Mr Beg from the firm Abdul Karim Bros, Ispahani of Madras, and an unnamed silk exporter from Junagadh who was the representative in Japan of a firm based in Rangoon. 82 By 1915, India had replaced China as Japan's largest export market for certain goods, such as matches; 83 Muslim merchants from the Bombay Presidency played a leading role in exporting a wide range of other Japanese manufactures (such as ceramics, glassware, and cotton goods), in return largely importing raw cotton. 84 Some of the Indian merchants, such as 'Abd al-Qadir ('Mr Kadir') of Madras and Jayyakar of Bombay, had lived in Japan since the Meiji opening of the country forty years earlier and had taken Japanese wives and citizenship.…”