Japan was a country isolated form the rest of the world for most of her history. Japan is an island, making it difficult to access, and this fact also separated it from most of the history of other Asian nations. This began to change when the first European ships arrived and sought trade with different parts of Asia. Japan resisted for a time, but eventually the Japanese began to see certain defense and trade advantages in making alliances with different countries. One of the major sources for this effort was a fear of Russia and a desire to keep Russia at bay. The United States was the first to try to open Japan to the outside world, but Britain also became interested in a defense and trade alliance with Japan and with China and so sought the means to accomplish such an agreement. At the end of the nineteenth century, the first of several Anglo-Japanese alliance treaties came into being, offering each of the signatories some of what they wanted and creating a relationship that would last into the twentieth century. The British and the Japanese renewed their agreement twice, each time seeking some change in the basic agreement while reaffirming the need for an alliance.
The last half of the Tokugawa period began in the middle of the eighteenth century, and this was also the era of the rise of industrialism in Europe. Japan during this era maintained her policy of seclusion. A change came about in 1858 when Japan signed commercial treaties with five countries, less as a choice than because it was increasingly apparent that Japan could no longer avoid freer trade with foreign nations. Takao Tsuchiya points out that this change would create an influence that was enormous:
The Japanese feudal economic order which was already on the verge of bankruptcy had to be swiftly revolutionized. Moreover. . . Japan now had to transform her economic life quickly into a modern capitalistic system."
The speed of the transition...