FOR BOTH BRITAIN and Japan, the 1860s were turbulent years in international affairs. Researchers working on the politics of the bakumatsu era have been drawn to the diversity, complexity and entanglement of its voices and opinions. Historians of the British Empire, too, are increasingly mindful of ‘the chaotic pluralism of private and sub-imperial interests’ that characterised mid-Victorian expansion. In the same way, understanding the fallout of the Namamugi incident also means getting away from explanations that prioritise interstate relations, or that speak of ‘British’ and ‘Japanese’ policy as if coherent and united positions existed at the time. Instead, the challenge is to explain how particular interests were able to achieve purchase over the course of Britain's response to the Richardson affair, and to pay attention to its information milieu: the forms and means by which information from the periphery was gathered, processed and disseminated at home. To do this, we must recognise up front the motivating power of ideas (including the idea of ‘outrage’ itself), while tracing the actions of the groups that promoted them. The chaotic events of 14–15 September had demonstrated that there was no clear, axiomatic way to respond to Richardson's death. Instead, a reaction favouring armed intervention would have to be built, and a particular image of Richardson propagated for the purpose.

Compared with their counterparts at Shanghai or Canton, the British merchants of Yokohama held less sway in London. But there lay an advantage in their relative isolation, too. For much of the 1860s, British policy towards Japan was relayed through a persistent fog of confusion. Officials admitted struggling to understand Japanese factions, distinguish Japanese personalities and make sense of a tumultuous political environment. They openly despaired of ‘the great difficulty of obtaining any reliable information in this country’. Bakufu politics, glimpsed through fleeting images and inferences, left even seasoned observers feeling adrift: ‘so tangled is Japanese policy’, the American Francis Hall confided in his diary, ‘that no one dare affirm that he understands it’. Even Rutherford Alcock confessed as much:

BY THE TIME Richardson's ship pulled into Shanghai, the Treaty of Nanjing was ten years old. The rights and wrongs of the Opium War had divided British opinion, but with peace came soaring expectations of the gains: in the years before Richardson's departure from England, the idea of China buzzed as the latest frontier of British commerce. Westerners’ ignominious ‘confinement’ to Canton seemed a thing of the past. Foreigners now had the right to reside at Fuzhou, Xiamen, Ningbo and Shanghai. Their encounters with the Chinese were to be shielded under the provisions of extraterritoriality. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain's control and, drawing on its vast military reserve in India, became the pivot of British maritime power along the China coast.

Among the newly-opened treaty ports, Shanghai was quick to emerge as the merchants’ favoured prospect. Sitting near the mouth of the vast Yangtze river, many pictured Shanghai becoming the premier interface between the world and the productive regions of Middle China. A prosperous walled city and its suburbs – perhaps 200,000 strong by Richardson's time – had commanded an important trade in cotton long before the Westerners came. But with the formal opening of Shanghai to foreign trade in November, 1843, a separate settlement was staked out, three-quarters of a mile to the north, beyond the city walls and the narrow Yanging Creek, on a low, flat stretch of land where the Wusong and Huangpu rivers met (pl.3). Between the two sites – the walled Chinese city, and the foreigners’ self-proclaimed ‘model settlement’ – lay a ‘deep cultural and psychological gulf ‘; both Chinese and foreigners produced detailed maps of their own communities that rendered the other a blank space.

At the time of Richardson's arrival the foreign settlement was about 430 acres in size: exclusive, upstart, and expressly orientated towards the river; a bustling anchorage, ‘the Liverpool of China’. A few short years of activity had already been sufficient ‘to turn the course of trade in all the chief staples…from the long-beaten track of Canton’ toward its northern rival. At Shanghai the water's edge had already become the Bund, that much mythologised embankment running north to south along the Huangpu, lined by floating jetties and impressive two-storey commercial buildings that were office, storehouse and residence combined.

SHORTLY AFTER NOON on 15 August 1863, batteries along the shoreline of Kagoshima opened fire on a British naval squadron arranged around the bay. They had caught them at anchor. The flagship Euryalus was soon enveloped in an exchange of fire so intense that old hands likened it to the siege of Sebastopol. Her Captain and Commander, both standing alongside their Admiral, were killed on the bridge by the same shot. As the ship hurriedly cleared for action and commenced shelling the town (starting a blaze that would rage for days), her band struck up the popular tune: Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?

The answer to that question is deceptively straightforward, and was set out at the time by Britain's Chargé d’Affaires in Japan, Colonel Edward Neale, in a note penned while at anchor off Kagoshima. The attack on Richardson's party at Namamugi, eleven months before, was ‘an unprovoked outrage’ that had ‘filled with great and just indignation the British Government and people’. It warranted a punitive indemnity, financial compensation, and the execution of the chief perpetrators. After months of delay, the bakufu had finally done its part, delivering £100,000 to the British Consulate in Yokohama. But Satsuma continued to hold out. Now Neale had brought a British squadron to Kagoshima to deliver a final ultimatum, only to encounter further equivocation. ‘The formal reply of the Prince of Satsuma… has now reached me’, Neale informed Admiral Kuper on the 14th:

The historiography of ancient Morocco is a sequence of incursions and migrations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the dolmens of Morocco were considered proof of the migration of ‘populations blondes’ to Africa from the Iberian Peninsula in the second half of the second millennium BC. Based on a comparison of megalithic tombs from Spain and the presence of light-haired indigenous people, this migratory theory was supported by two authoritative French scholars: the diplomat-archaeologistCharles Tissot and the neurologist-anthropologist Paul Brocca. Gabriel Camps also considered the megalithic dolmens found in three zones of Morocco (the Tangier peninsula, the Grand Atlas mountains south of Marrakech and the territory of the Béni-Snassen at the Algerian border) to be similar to the Iberian megalithic cist tombs of the second millennium BC and distinct from the Algerian and Tunisian dolmens.

At the start of this volume, we outlined three main themes: burial archaeology, migration and identity. In this concluding chapter, we revisit these themes in light of the varied case studies and examples explored in this book.

We believe this volume illustrates that there is irrefutable evidence of links and connections that serve to define a Trans-Saharan zone at an early date. Migration and mobility created networks of connectivity and elements of a shared culture (koine).

Berber languages are still spoken across large swathes of the Sahara today and Ehret and Blench in their chapters both argue that this was even more pronounced in the past, albeit they propose quite different reconstructions as to when and how Berber migration occurred.Ehret’s analysis of the family of Berber languages and his ordering of these in relative chronology, in terms of degrees of similarity and difference, is an important contribution.