In his first book, Hard times in the hometown, Martin Dusinberre wrote how his chosen research subject of Kaminoseki, a town in coastal Yamaguchi prefecture, was not just the site of local history, but ‘was also a site of global history, in which the lived experiences of the townspeople regularly traversed the borders of municipality, region, or nation’.Footnote ¹ He showed us that it was not just these lived experiences that tied the town and townspeople of Kaminoseki to scales of history beyond the local or national, but the built environment also. Kaminoseki’s overseas migrants, who left the town in the Meiji period (1868–1912) for Hawai‘i, Korea, and California, built houses, endowed schools and shrines, and constructed commemorative stones to carve their beneficence into their hometown’s landscape.

In Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories, Dusinberre takes up the built environment of migrant hometowns once again, as one example of a ‘non-traditional’ and global archive which offers historians new perspectives on the worlds of those Japanese migrants who, in the late nineteenth century – the book mainly deals with the 1880s and 1890s – left economically marginalized and declining hometowns like Kaminoseki. They sought new opportunities in a world being swiftly connected by steamships, undersea telegraph cables, global networks of mail, and unified understandings of time. One of these steamships, the Yamashiro-maru, acts as the book’s throughline of sorts. However, this will not be an archival journey of plain sailing and calm seas.

Dusinberre’s new book is a kaleidoscopic investigation of the ‘world of the Yamashiro-maru’ as well as ‘the worlds it both navigated and helped create’.Footnote ² But it is also a welcome problematizing of the process of researching and writing such a global history. Mooring the global archive is a valuable addition to a growing body of scholarship on the historical archive, especially for its unique perspectives from both global and Japanese history, and the sheer range of scholarship with which Dusinberre is in conversation. For Dusinberre, global history today can too often mean ‘all-encompassing vistas of modernity and globalization’, where the archival work has been processed already by specialist historians, and the global historian (usually anglophone) simply swoops in to connect these bodies of research (also often anglophone) and synthesize them.Footnote ³ The ‘global archive’, Dusinberre posits, is not a key focus for global historians in the anglophone literature, or in this case, in Japanese scholarship either. This book offers an alternative to the former issue, and a thought-provoking engagement with the question of what or where the ‘global archive’ might be.

This book might have been very different. In its first chapter, we follow Dusinberre, in the early stages of his research for a global history via a ‘biography’ of the Yamashiro-maru, into three ‘archival traps’ – from which he has had to extricate himself and this project. First, Dusinberre realizes that a biography of the Yamashiro-maru, constructed in the shipyards of Newcastle upon Tyne, where Dusinberre was teaching at the outset of this project, would read too much like a ‘unidirectional’ or ‘diffusionist’ history where civilization travels from West to ‘rest’.Footnote ⁴ It would also fail to really capture the world as viewed from the perspective of Dusinberre’s proposed historical actors – the migrants which the Yamashiro-maru carried from Japan across the Pacific in the late nineteenth century. Second, these migrants’ viewpoints would also be obscured, Dusinberre discovered, if he relied on the growing online archive of digitized materials, increasingly text-searchable, made easily available, and often inevitable as a first port of call during the global pandemic which disrupted his research plans. As Lara Putnam has shown, in the simultaneous expansion of transnational history and digitization, globally available online databases and digitization projects overwhelmingly privilege English and other Western-language materials.Footnote ⁵ And, as Dusinberre points out, our searches through these, and the results thrown up by them, are mediated by powerful and quick-changing search engine algorithms. How can the historian hope to retrace her steps? Finally, Dusinberre argues, even the written word collected in state and local archives, which again privilege power and those close to it, would not be enough to render visible the worlds of the Yamashiro-maru and its migrant histories.

This is where Dusinberre reprises his attentions to the global material archive – the built environment of migrants’ hometowns, their resting-places, their lives on board the ship – along with other unconventional archives that ground, or moor, or act as a ‘berth’ (there are many maritime terms used throughout). In other words, this is global history in that it traces the worlds and histories of ‘Japanese people on the move’ in a globalizing moment. As such, it draws on – and is an important contribution to – a growing body of scholarship on the role of Japanese migrants in the formation of the Japanese imperial state. But these migrants were also important in terms of their roles in shaping their destinations across the Asia Pacific as well, and this, rather than Japan’s ‘nation-empire’ is Dusinberre’s main focus in Mooring the global archive: ‘to examine how migrants became entangled in the colonial contexts of the polities in which they worked, and the historiographical implications thereof’.Footnote ⁶ Dusinberre writes in the epilogue that one of his aims for the book is to ‘ensure no survey history of modern Japan can be written without a longer discussion of overseas migration’. In the spirit of the book’s scale and scope, we can push this aspiration further. We can hope that, with this new body of research – of which Dusinberre’s scholarship is an important part – global historians of the late nineteenth century will now take seriously the involvement of overseas migration of Japanese in key globalizing processes.

At its heart, Mooring the global archive is a history of the expansion and projection of power (imperial and otherwise) and of how vectors of this power – like the Yamashiro-maru itself – worked to spread ideas and expand networks. More important for Dusinberre than the process itself, however, is what these extensions and projections across space and time lose or accumulate in the process: how knowledge shifts, how new versions of people get created in transit. As he writes, this is a ‘histor[y] of meaning changing in passage’.Footnote ⁷ This ‘inbetweenness’ is mirrored, or doubled – first in the moment of expansion itself, and second in Dusinberre’s search for its traces in – and between – the ‘global’ archives. This essay first looks at some of Dusinberre’s historical examples of how these processes of extension led to ‘inbetweenness’, before shifting to think about their parallels in the book’s discussion of archival practices and the ‘global archive’.

Even for its author, in the course of writing this book, meanings and touchstones have shifted. Dusinberre describes moving away from the symbology of the ship as vector, to the waters that propel it. This represents a shift in attention – from to the vectors for globalization to its many environments. In terms of historical interventions, this shift is seen in an attention to the nature of seemingly global-scale processes that led to Japanese migrants moving from villages in places like Kaminoseki or Amakusa to places like the pearl fisheries of Thursday Island or the sugar plantations of Hawai‘i. What Dusinberre (along with others) shows is how these processes often emerged out of local contexts. In the final chapter on Karatsu coal, for example, Dusinberre describes Karatsu Port’s opening in 1889 as ‘an opportunity to expand into East Asia…riverine transportation networks first depicted in…1784’. Viewed from a local perspective, these processes transcend national-level periodizations: ‘the line connecting 1784 to 1889…merely extend[ed] the infrastructure of coal transportation from the Matsuura river to an East Asian arena’.Footnote ⁸ In chapter 2, we see another extension, this time of ideas of prefectural identity from Meiji Japan to Hawai‘i, via the groups formed on board the Yamashiro-maru in transit.Footnote ⁹ In chapter 3, ‘Outside the archive’, we see how, rather than an extension of networks on a new international scale, responses to changing global and local socio-economic circumstances could also take the form of a ‘rerouting’ of networks – in this case the movement of regional migrant labourers like Fuyuki Sakazō, from the port town of Murotsu to Hawai‘i.

But in these moments of projection and expansion, Dusinberre and his historical actors often find themselves adrift, or in uncharted territory, in brackish waters where assumed binaries break down, and where various historical agents attempt to mould understandings, or reframe themselves and others. The book’s second body chapter, ‘Between the archives’, offers a variety of examples of this, focusing on the first arrival of the Yamashiro-maru in Hawai‘i in June 1885. Even the landfall of this ship was subject to multiple interpretations in local reports: either as an ‘immigrant ship’ which threatened to overrun Hawai‘i with Asian labour, or as a ‘splendid specimen’ representing Japan’s advancement and marked difference from other immigrant-sending countries in Asia.Footnote ¹⁰

We see this inbetweenness again in the history of a painting of Japanese plantation workers, given by the Hawaiian king, and commissioned by his ambassador to Japan, Robert W. Irwin. What unfurls are multiple (re)framings of these Japanese migrants by Irwin, his artist, the intended and eventual recipients of the painting, and even by Dusinberre himself, in battles over ideas of civilization, industriousness, and national identity. This complex history raises many questions. When those being recorded have no control over their own representations, how do we reframe the intentions of the recorders? How do these gaps between intentions and reality reshape our understanding of global history?

These gaps, between visions of colonization and other projections of power as laid out in conventional archival materials, and their reality as glimpsed via more unusual sources, are also a key theme of chapter 5, ‘The archive and I’. In this chapter, Dusinberre works through a seemingly first-hand account by a woman, Usa, trafficked to a brothel on Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. This process of archival deciphering raises difficult questions: how can we access Usa’s lived experiences when we have only her English-language account, mediated by powerful Japanese men in the local migrant community? Whilst the Meiji government saw women in Usa’s position as ‘unsightly’, and a threat to its civilized image, what was Usa’s understanding of the world as seen from her home in Nagasaki, from her planned destination of Singapore, and the world she found herself in when she was trafficked to Thursday Island?

Although Dusinberre left behind the idea of his book being a straightforward biography of the Yamashiro-maru, Mooring the global archive’s periodization is still shaped by the ship’s life history. The book focuses in on the years when the Yamashiro-maru was engaged in transporting Japanese migrants overseas. If Dusinberre had instead followed the longer biographies of its migrants, or others like them, I wonder how the perspective offered in the book would change? First, we might get a longer discussion of the expansion of Japan’s formal empire, and the ways in which migrants like Fuyuki and Usa often traversed both Asian and Pacific empires in the course of their lifetimes – as explored in work by Eiichiro Azuma and many others.Footnote ¹¹ Dusinberre might also have been able to draw on the rich on-board archives that do exist for later migrations between Brazil and Hawai‘i, discussed in Yamada Michio’s book, Japanese emigration history as seen through ships, which Dusinberre cites.Footnote ¹² The concept of ‘the world seen from migrant ships’ is also the topic of a recent book by Negawa Sachio, which actually begins with a chapter on a diary of a ‘gannenmono’ – a migrant on the first ship of workers that made landfall in Hawai‘i in 1868 – before mainly focusing on migrant ships to South America.Footnote ¹³

Although Japan’s own empire is not a major subject of Dusinberre’s book, it is present through the ways in which Dusinberre draws out spatial as well as temporal extensions. In the book’s final chapter, ‘The burned archive’ (which, chronologically, could have been its first), we get a neat encapsulation of many of the book’s themes via a history, not of the steamship Yamashiro-maru itself, but its fuel – coal. As a fuel for many late nineteenth-century accelerations, coal – specifically coal from Kyushu – is, in Dusinberre’s telling of it, a source of energy that was connected to the expansion of Japanese territory even prior to the emergence of its modern empire. From the eighteenth century onwards, Kyushu coal was heavily used in the production of salt. This salt allowed for the preservation of increasingly large fishing catches from further and further north: ‘into the islands of Ezo and the world of the Indigenous Ainu Peoples’.Footnote ¹⁴ Later, Kyushu coal was used as fuel for ships that would take Japanese migrants – witting or unwitting vectors of Japanese power – further afield still.

Elsewhere, possibilities for drawing out more from these extensions and networks are less fully explored. In chapter 2, the eventual home of Irwin’s commissioned painting of Japanese plantation workers is ‘Taito Co, Tokyo’ – the Taiwan Sugar Company’s headquarters in Tokyo. Taitō was a company with origins in Japan’s first overseas colony of Taiwan, and was connected to Hawai‘i via figures like Irwin. This connection is an indication of how extractive capitalism and imperial expansion both played key roles in connecting Japanese ‘national’ history to the major flows of global history, and how Japanese involvement in both often exceeded the bounds of its own formal empire.

On a methodological level, the relative absence of Japan’s formal empire is perhaps an indication of the contested nature of the relationship between global history and imperial history. Indeed, Dusinberre’s work at the interstices of multiple empires is helpful for thinking deeply about this relationship. In terms of historical and archival approach, Dusinberre’s focus on ‘brackishness’ connects to his discussion, in chapter 4, of the Indigenous Australian (Yolŋu) worldview, where ‘“country” extends across sea and land’, and binaries as drawn on nineteenth-century shipping maps do not pertain.Footnote ¹⁵ This ‘brackish world’, Dusinberre is arguing, is a useful characterization not only of the environments in which Pacific world migrants lived, but also of the archival environments in which we must search for their historical traces.

This brings us to Dusinberre’s main claim about the global archive – that in order to avoid the traps discussed in chapter 1, we must broaden our definition of what an archive is. Furthermore, Dusinberre argues, we must not simply read ‘along the archival grain’ of official documents found in the colonial archive, à la Ann Laura Stoler; we must understand that the ‘“grain” was also constructed in the spaces between archives’.Footnote ¹⁶ What does this entail? Dusinberre argues for the importance of paying attention to the dynamics of this ‘transimperial epistemological space’. This reinforces my previous point about the interplay between global and imperial history: for the time period under discussion, global history is both transimperial history, but also history between and across empires, and between imperial archives.

Via this discussion, Dusinberre draws attention to a pitfall that lies in wait for would-be global historians: just how much harder it might be to become experts at reading along the grain in spaces between the archives, when we ourselves are often adrift in new fields or regions of research. Where the extraction of coal allowed for expansion overseas, Dusinberre argues, the ‘mining’ of newly digitized materials has allowed for the formation and expansion of the field of global history: indeed, the language of new ‘fields’ of research carries within it imperialist overtones.

Dusinberre’s valuable engagement with Indigenous understandings of history, especially putting them into conversation with Japanese studies, is a step towards the globalizing of global history methodology itself. Global history will not be truly global if it remains Eurocentric in methodology and only global in content. However, as he points out, ‘my argument that historians must broaden our definition of “the archive” also entails an acknowledgement of narrowed accessibility: global history cannot be synonymous with my unfettered right to access or tell everyone else’s stories’.Footnote ¹⁷ While introducing other ways of doing history, Dusinberre fruitfully explores the ethical dimensions to debates about the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸

However, our approaches to archives are also mediated by texts and scholarship as well as identity and positionality. Dusinberre’s ability to connect a variety of linguistic fields, especially beyond European languages, is a valuable one, and one still under-represented in the field of global history.Footnote ¹⁹ Nonetheless, by broadening our definition of the archive, we also broaden the range of fields our work touches, and the amount of work required to engage responsibly with the scholarship of experts in these fields. On this, one question that inevitably arises, given the connections and parallels Dusinberre makes between these migrant histories and the archival work required to recover them, is whether we as ‘global historians’ or writers of what we might call ‘globalized histories’, also end up in these spaces of over-reach or extension? What might get overlooked in these spaces of warped and changed meanings; of ‘brackishness’? Whilst Dusinberre shows deep engagement with a range of scholarship in many chapters, in his chapter on Usa, the woman on Thursday Island, there were opportunities for more engagement with Japanese-language secondary scholarship on sex work and sex-trafficking which might have added more context to this archival encounter.

I wrote at the beginning of this essay that the journey Dusinberre takes us on will not be plain sailing, and indeed it is not. The many methodological and historical questions which Dusinberre’s focus on the ‘Japanese ship’ of the Yamashiro-maru and its ‘migrant histories’ allows him to interrogate are fruitful and valuable. But I wondered if the often-frustrating search for ‘ego-documents’ – first person singular archival accounts – of the ship’s migrants themselves was revealing of something else? Whilst Dusinberre intersperses the chapters with his own ‘authorial meta-data’, was the stubbornness with which he sticks to the Yamashiro-maru as heuristic device and throughline, despite numerous dead ends and misgivings, due to it being something like an ‘ego-document’ itself? After all, the Yamashiro-maru connected Newcastle upon Tyne with Japan – two sites of importance for the author. I am sure most historians, myself included, write from these places of personal attachment. Elsewhere, Dusinberre admits freely that his book is ‘a personal confession of historical practices in the first decades of the 21^st century’, but on this point – of the genesis of the book’s throughline – he remains somewhat opaque.Footnote ²⁰

This brings me to my final point. The opening line of Sebastian Conrad’s What is global history? is a quotation by C. A. Bayly: ‘All historians are world historians now…though many have not realised it.’Footnote ²¹ Likewise, Dusinberre’s interventions and his suggestions for better ‘historical practices’, are, I would argue, not only applicable to those wanting to write global history, but to all historians working today. The process of writing history itself has been so globalized that the confessions of historical practices found within this book will feel familiar to many historians working now. Dusinberre’s descriptions of the ‘global archive’ describe the conditions of creation for many contemporary historians in the UK, the US, and elsewhere; albeit those with the privileges – swiftly being eroded – of time, money, and access which allow for intensive research and travel. These conditions of creation are also reflected in the book’s structure: ‘at times like a montage’. The vast scope of information at our fingertips – our ability to find in moments, on Google Maps, a Street View panorama of a historical actor’s place of birth, for example – creates endless distractions and detours from previously more linear processes of research and writing.

It is clear that the globalized archive is already disrupting and reshaping our work as historians: Dusinberre’s book is a timely reminder of both the dangers and the possibilities that this holds.