This paper examines Japan's response to ‘external pressure', mainly from Europe and the US, focussing on the ‘mercantile response' by merchants and financiers. Before the beginning of free trade in 1859, many money exchange merchants in Osaka transacted with merchants and wealthy farmers...

This paper analyzes how free trade and mercantilism had confronted to each other in the Ottoman Empire and how free trade in the Ottoman Empire had yielded to mercantilism. It particularly, analyzes the case of Aleppo a trading city in the Ottoman Empire. Aleppo evidences that how its liberal...