Toshiaki Tamaki
Toshiaki Tamaki is Professor of Economic History at Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan. He was originally trained as a specialist in the early modern Baltic trade, with a particular focus on long-distance commerce, shipping, and the institutional structures that supported exchange in Northern Europe. His early research examined how merchants, ports, and commercial practices connected the Baltic region to wider European markets.
Over time, this regional focus led him to broader questions concerning circulation, intermediation, and the organisation of global trade. Building on his work on the Baltic, Professor Tamaki gradually expanded his research to encompass European expansion, diasporic merchant networks, and the global infrastructures that enabled long-distance exchange. This shift reflected an increasing interest in how economic coordination was achieved across political and cultural boundaries, rather than in production alone.
His subsequent research has emphasised the role of commissions, logistics, financial mechanisms, and communication systems in shaping global economic connections from the early modern period to the nineteenth century. Through this work, he has developed the concept of “commission capitalism” to explain how economic gains were generated and appropriated through circulation and intermediation. He is particularly interested in the ways in which imperial powers internalised intermediary functions through control over shipping, insurance, finance, and information.
Professor Tamaki has published widely in global and economic history and has presented his research at numerous international conferences. He is currently working on a book-length project that reinterprets global economic history through the lens of intermediation and infrastructure. His presentation today draws on this broader research trajectory.
Kyoto Sangyo University
Session
This paper reconsiders the making of the modern global economy by shifting analytical focus from production to intermediation. Rather than treating globalisation as an unmediated outcome of technological progress or market integration, it argues that global connections were historically structured through commissions, logistics, finance, and communication infrastructures. From the fifteenth century to the early twentieth century, European expansion depended less on manufacturing capacity than on the ability to organise circulation across vast distances.
The paper introduces the concept of commission capitalism to capture this structural logic. In the early modern period, diasporic merchant communities—most notably Armenians in Eurasia and Sephardic Jews in the Atlantic—functioned as mobile intermediaries (Homo mobilis), linking producers and consumers across political and cultural boundaries. Their activities demonstrate how global connections could flourish even in the absence of territorial sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, however, these intermediary functions were progressively internalised by the British Empire. Through maritime supremacy, marine insurance, financial clearing in London, and above all the global telegraph network, Britain transformed dispersed mercantile intermediation into an imperial infrastructure.
By controlling shipping routes, insurance markets, and information flows, Britain extracted commissions from the global circulation of goods, capital, and knowledge—even as industrial leadership shifted to Germany and the United States. Globalisation, therefore, was not a neutral or borderless process, but one mediated by imperial infrastructures that redistributed economic returns asymmetrically. The paper situates nineteenth-century globalisation as an infrastructural and informational order rather than a simple expansion of trade.
By foregrounding intermediation and infrastructure, this study invites a rethinking of global history, which places mobility, communication, and commissions at the centre of world economic transformation. It invites a rethinking of global history that places mobility, communication, and commissions at the centre of world economic transformation.