Basic Research on the Business Documants of the 18th Centuty

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(1) The Head Investigator (FUKASAWA,Katsumi) constructed a date base from hundreds of bills of exhange, conserved in the "fonds Roux" of the Archives de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille, and analyzed these data to study successfully the mechnism of circulation of money and capital between France and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century, as well as the prosopograpy of merchant-bankers manipulating this mechanism.(2) The Head Investigator also collected merchant's manuals and dictionaties of commerce which had been published in the 17th-19th centries, such as Savary, Le Parfait negociant ; Ricard, Le negoce d'Amsterdan ; Guillaumin (ed.), Dictionnaire du commerce et de la navigation, and made a basic bibliographical study.(3) The other Investigator (NAKAMURA,Tadashi) collected the account books of Dutch East India Company's office at Nagasaki, and other documents concerning the "Deshima trade", in order to study the commericial technics and trading activities in the Far East in the 18th century.(4) The first result of these studies is to have investigated the mechanism of international banking and commerce from business documents which reflect the reality of economic activities, and not from political or administrative documants. The second result is to have enabled historians of Europe, Japan and Asia to cooperate for a study of the commercial contact between Europe and Aisa, as well as of the worldwide circulation of merchandises and money.