Chapter 7 discusses the emergence of new actors in the Kuroshio frontier over the decades after the shogunate’s retreat from the Bonin Islands. It observes that pirates, state officials, and scientists formed a triangle of frontier actors. The pirate Benjamin Pease vied for state approval of his local rule in the Bonins, but eventually it was individuals like the official-botanist Tanaka Yoshio or the Bonin settler Thomas Webb who helped showcase the colonial flagship project of the young Meiji empire. The relationship of state and commercial agents, as much as the swift reconfiguration of settler identities on the ground, reflected the physical fluidity and political instability of the contested ocean frontier. Taming this frontier was a project of ideological significance for Japan. Clarifying the state’s relationship with its new subjects by testing new forms of subjecthood was central to this process. The flagship colony in the Bonin Islands became the site of state-funded agrarian experiments centered on exotic fruits and medical plants. Showcased at agricultural exhibitions, these experiments underpinned the “enlightened” character of Japanese colonialism.

The epilogue begins with the reversion of the Bonin Islands to Japan in 1968, after twenty-three years of US postwar occupation. Reflecting on imperial nostalgia and the meanings attributed to a rising Pacific for the future of Japan, it returns to the book’s initial question about the Pacific’s place in the archipelago’s history. It argues that the ocean today is an “unending frontier,” a cognitive mode engraved in both the promise of continued economic expansion and in the hopes for a more sustainable economy. The effects of climate change raise new questions about the origins of industrial modernity. The epilogue suggests conceptual models inspired at ocean currents to rethink diachronic historical causations and challenge teleology. With the first industrial revolution in Asia, Japan’s imperial emergence lives in the upstream of present ecological transformations. Studying the historical processes that direct state and industry interests to specific places within the dynamic seascapes of currents, habitats, and mineral deposits, embed the human relationship with the ocean in its historically grown, volumetric dimension.

Chapter 6 discusses the colonization of the Bonin Islands under the Tokugawa shogunate in 1862–1863. It shows how the steamboat Kanrin-maru’s venture to the Pacific archipelago offered an opportunity to develop and display national symbols of sovereignty, progress, and power vis-à-vis the islanders, just nine years after the arrival of Perry’s black ships. The subsequent occupation of territory under the hinomaru flag and the mapping and labeling of landmarks with Japanese toponyms was an attempt at harmonizing early modern conceptions of climate, subjecthood, and benevolent governance with the exigencies of administrative control over a stateless immigrant community in a colonial competition against Western empires. The chapter argues that the Bonin Islands figured as an experimental colony through which shogunal scholars and officials encountered foreign plants, technologies, and bodies of knowledge at a formative time of Japan’s imperial reinvention. Though upended prematurely in the summer of 1863, this colonial experiment offers a rare window on the possibilities of an imperial modernity under the Tokugawa that never materialized.

In the 1890s and 1900s, theologian and activist Jabez T. Sunderland became a keen follower of the Brāhmos, conceding that the Brāhmo movement and the Unitarian movement to which he belonged form parallel tracks in the reconstruction of religion. These parallel tracks manifest in both the rise of Indian religious reformers in the USA from the second half of the nineteenth century as well as North American religious reformers and theorists deepening their interest, and commitment, to, Indian religion. One of these Indian reformers who visited the United States was none other than the Brāhmo missionary and intellectual P.C. Mozoomdar, who lectured and wrote a great deal about Jesus, social service as a form of service to God, as inspirations for the new, Brāhmo religion. Mozoomdar argued that this new religion, keeping in faith and standards of worship, born out by the comparative method. The linkages between the USA and India in the realm of religion continued through the end of the century, with the rise of one Narendra Nath Datta, known from the 1890s as Swami Vivekananda in the USA in 1893. This final chapter includes a variety of critical engagements after the death of Keshab Chandra Sen and the appreciation of his ideas by the American parallel to the Brāhmo Samaj, the Free Religious Association, which began in the 1870s. These new conceptions of Indian religion preceded and paralleled the rise of Vivekananda by the 1890s. This chapter ends with a consideration of Vivekananda, a figure whose definitions of religion become dominant by the end of the century.

So wrote Ghulam Husain Salim Zaidpuri in the mid-1780s as he documented the history of Bengal. Charting the course of Islamic rule from its foundation in the thirteenth century to his own lifetime, Zaidpuri provided insights into the region's past and present as a tale of political transformations. The author was in fact a witness to the changing trajectories of Indian politics under British rule. What Aurangzeb had referred to as ‘Subah Jannat-e-Bilad-Bangla’ (Paradise on Earth, the Land of Bengal) in the latter half of the seventeenth century had eventually turned into the ‘British Bridgehead’. Bengal provided Britons with a foundation to develop their political influence over the rest of India. While direct British political intervention into Indian kingdoms had already begun in the Carnatic in the 1740s, Bengal became their training ground for experiments regarding civil and military administration at the cost of local rulers. By the early nineteenth century, we find the majority of Indian royalty coming under British control. It was not long after Napoleon Bonaparte's downfall in 1815 that the British defeated the Marathas and achieved, according to nationalist Indian historiography, the paramountcy in India.3 At the core of such developments was the reshaping of the concept of political authority, as the British increasingly superseded Indian rulers who remained heads of their kingdoms only in name.