I

If history-writing is an act of translation, of rendering a foreign country intelligible to the reader or seminar student, then simply for the thrills and spills I would seek out a land far removed from my daily pastures – distant from my childhood memories of Cambridge, England, from my working life in Switzerland, and from a community of scholars also interested in Japanese historiography. Ideally, I would be able to write about Japan's late nineteenth-century expansion through the biography of a man such as Sanuki Jūkichi. Born in 1858 into a farming household, Sanuki grew up in a small town to the south-west of Hiroshima, close to the Inland Sea coast. In May 1885, he was declared of sound mind and body by an older relative; a few weeks later, he boarded the Yamashiro-maru and crossed the Pacific Ocean to begin a new life as a sugar plantation labourer in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.Footnote ¹ For the next five years, Sanuki worked at the Hakalau plantation on Hawaiʻi Island itself. On 24 April 1890, he then boarded a barque called the Enoch Talbot, bound for Adelaide, where he landed two months later; but in Australia he disappears from the historical record.Footnote ²

Despite these all too brief details, Sanuki's life would be worthy of translation because his migrations from Japan to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, and then on to the Australian colonies, embodied what contemporary Japanese scholars came to call the ‘Pacific age’. As we shall see, this term was the outcome of intellectual fermentations that occurred roughly between 1885 and 1890 – that is, in the same years as Sanuki's transpacific crossings. In an ideal world, therefore, Sanuki would be studied as a co-producer of the ‘Pacific age’ discourse, in that his migrations, and those of thousands of other Japanese men and women like him, gave material reality to otherwise abstract ideas about Japan's past and future place in world history. Thus, we would write a history which drew as equally on the experiences of the labourers as on those of the literati – while also not ignoring the animal actors, whose own migrations were so central to what scholars call the ‘co-crafting’ of the Pacific world.Footnote ³ But the archival world is not ideal: Sanuki's voice does not speak as loudly as those of the scholars, essayists, lecturers, and journalists whose written records comprise my sources in the following pages; as a consequence, the protagonists of this piece are far closer to the habitus of home and work than I would like.

That said, the reason why historians should care about articulations of the ‘Pacific age’ as rhetorical framings for the world in which Sanuki moved is that they constituted something new in the global outlook of many Japanese people in the late nineteenth century. Sanuki's crossing to Hawaiʻi, as part of a second shipment of Japanese labourers (the first had left in January 1885), was the first time in more than 250 years that the central state had permitted the mass migration of Japanese subjects overseas. Meanwhile, the intellectual struggle to formulate a coherent set of ideas about Japan's relationship to the Pacific Ocean grew out of the fact that, until the mid-nineteenth century, the world's largest maritime space had only minimally figured in Japanese thinking. As Marcia Yonemoto has shown, to Edo period (1600–1868) scholars the Pacific was a site of fear and ambivalence, its status encapsulated in Nagakubo Sekisui's 長久保赤水 (1717–1801) ‘Annotated map of the mountains and seas of all the world's countries’ (c. 1790). This map split the Pacific into two bodies of water, the ‘Small Eastern Sea’ (close to Japan) and the ‘Large Eastern Sea’ (far away towards North America), and thereby ‘cut the vast Pacific down to size’. Maps, according to Yonemoto, were ‘the coded and contextual language used to craft the notion of the Small Eastern Sea as a regional ocean basin, reinforcing Japan's sense of attachment to northeast Asia while dividing it from the “new” world, about which the Japanese knew little’.Footnote ⁴

A century later, however, this conceptual divide between Japan and the larger Pacific Ocean was no longer tenable in economic, military, or intellectual terms – just as the Sinocentric worldview on which it had been based was similarly coming under attack, most famously in Fukuzawa Yukichi's 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901) call for Japan to ‘cast off Asia’ (March 1885).Footnote ⁵ Whether it be in waves of labour migration, in networks of Japanese doctors, in naval explorations and the promotion of ‘southern expansion’ (nanshin 南進), in the search for resources such as guano and albatross feathers, or in the new infrastructures of marine science and fishing, growing numbers of Japanese people were active in the Pacific world by the beginning of the 1890s.Footnote ⁶ As a consequence, the Pacific – and not just the generic ‘Southern Seas’ (Nan'yō 南洋) – became an object of discursive interest for intellectuals who were already beginning to think about the nature of Japanese expansionism. But the challenge remained: how were they to conceptualize a space that had hitherto not been central to narratives of Japanese history?

In this article, I argue that time was central to the ways in which some Japanese scholars began to understand the Pacific world in the late nineteenth century. My focus is not on time in its material vestiges – a topic that has led to important new research on how (to take one example) Japanese people in the Edo period made the clock a part of their daily lives.Footnote ⁷ Rather, my starting point is the assumption that, for Japanese intellectuals to articulate a coherent idea of ‘the Pacific’, they needed first to create a historical frame of understanding. This was a challenge similar – and running parallel – to the much more substantial project of reorienting Japan in East Asian history (more substantial by dint of Japan's long cultural and intellectual interactions with the Sinosphere).Footnote ⁸ More generally, the articulation of the Pacific as a site of Japanese history spoke to what Christopher Hill identifies as the two key questions with which anyone writing national history at the end of the nineteenth century had to grapple: ‘First, what is the place of national territory in global economic and political space? Second, what is the relationship of the present national form of territoriality to those forms that have been superseded?’Footnote ⁹ As I shall argue, to think of Japan's territorial relationship to the Pacific spatially, certain intellectuals found it useful to think temporally; and in conceptualizing forms that had been superseded (that is, the past), those intellectuals wrote not only of the present but also of future histories.

Although the final articulation of these writings centred on a national territory – in this case, on Japan – their constructions were profoundly global in nature. By way of brief comparison, the history of Hokkaido demonstrates how global time, space, and disparate intellectual traditions became entangled in early Meiji Japan (1868–1912) – and, in truth, always had been, even during the so-called ‘closed country’ centuries (see David Mervart's contribution to this special issue). Until 1869, what is today Japan's northernmost main island, along with other islands in its northern vicinity, were collectively known as Ezo 蝦夷 (literally ‘land of barbarians’). Even before the Meiji Restoration, prominent intellectuals had called for Ezo to be settled by ‘mainlanders’ at the expense of the indigenous Ainu peoples. After 1869, such calls were buttressed by a selective reading of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), whose ideas were first debated in Japanese in 1876–7. Japanese overpopulation at home, it was argued, justified expansion in Hokkaido and beyond.Footnote ¹⁰ The vanguard of this colonization effort was a body of government-subsidized farmer-soldiers, known as the tondenhei 屯田兵. But this terminology of the tonden was actually Chinese in origin (tuntian), having been most recently employed by the Qing dynasty during its eighteenth-century expansion into Xinjiang.Footnote ¹¹ Meanwhile, in order to help the farmer-soldiers cultivate land in Hokkaido on a far greater scale than was possible on mainland farms, the Meiji government employed agriculturalists from the United States, some of whose expertise was derived from the settlement of the American west.Footnote ¹² As for the new name, ‘Hokkaidō’ 北海道 (literally ‘northern sea circuit’) extended the ‘five provinces, seven circuits’ logic of Japan's seventh- to eighth-century ritsuryō 律令 state, itself modelled on the Tang dynasty.Footnote ¹³ In other words, the Meiji state's expansion into Hokkaido was a confluence of ideas, concepts, and expertise which drew on Qing, European, and North American pasts, as well as on particular elements of Japan's own history.

And so it was with the articulation of Japan's ‘Pacific age’. At one level, the significance of this phrase can only be grasped by placing it in the wider context of what Akira Iriye once called ‘an indigenous tradition of expansionism in Japan’ – especially with reference to early modern Japan's maritime engagements with East and South-east Asia (see Birgit Tremml-Werner's contribution to this special issue).Footnote ¹⁴ At a second level, we can think of the ‘Japanese Pacific’ as emerging from the ways in which late nineteenth-century intellectuals imagined Japan's relationship to the emerging empire's ‘frontier’ in general and to North America in particular.Footnote ¹⁵ But, thirdly, there was also a crucial European context to Japanese articulations of the ‘Pacific’, as Pekka Korhonen noted in a ground-breaking article published in 1996. Cited by the aforementioned Marcia Yonemoto, and by many other scholars,Footnote ¹⁶ Korhonen's essay began with a striking claim:

Itself building on the work of Watanabe Akio, Korhonen's essay went on to sketch a late nineteenth-century Japanese understanding of the Pacific Ocean, thus contributing to an English-language historiography which had already begun to challenge the problematic idea of the Pacific as a Spanish, English, or American ‘lake’ – that is, of the Pacific as merely a Euro-American construct.Footnote ¹⁸ Korhonen's identification of the little-known Inagaki Manjirō 稲垣満次郎 (1861–1908), and his noting of Carl Ritter's (1779–1859) influence on Inagaki as refracted through J. R. Seeley (1834–95), suggested a complex intellectual genealogy. In the opening pages of his article, Korhonen traced this genealogy in Inagaki's 1890 book, Japan and the Pacific, before jumping forward to a Japanese-language publication from 1892, in which Inagaki first used the phrase Taiheiyō jidai 太平洋時代 (‘the Pacific age’). ‘Inagaki was the one who named the new age’, Korhonen argued.Footnote ¹⁹ But, he continued, Inagaki's expansionist vision must also be compared to those of contemporary American thinkers, including Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) and Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919).

In what follows, I leave questions of intellectual firsts and of North American contexts for another day. Rather, in focusing on a watery expanse whose spatial conceptualization in global intellectual histories remains understudied in comparison to its Atlantic, Indian, or Mediterranean counterparts,Footnote ²⁰ my challenge to Korhonen's analysis of the ‘Pacific age’ – my debt to his work notwithstanding – arises from his model of the introduction and transference of ideas from Europe to East Asia. Recent research in the history of knowledge has pointed out that ‘transfer’ is a deeply problematic metaphor for intellectual history: it implies the movement of an object from A to B without any modulation along the way, and thus reinforces a model of unilinear knowledge diffusion, usually from Europe to the non-European world.Footnote ²¹ As Kapil Raj and others have argued, to overcome such assumptions about the diffusion, dissemination, or transmission of ideas, scholars would do better to think in terms of ‘processes of encounter, power and resistance, negotiation, and reconfiguration’ – that is, to focus on the construction of what Harald Fischer-Tiné pithily calls pidgin-knowledge.Footnote ²² In the case of Inagaki's coining of the ‘Pacific age’, this means, first, that we must examine more closely the nature of Inagaki's engagement with Seeley's ideas, thereby questioning simplistic notions of the Cambridge professor's ‘influence’ or ‘impact’ on his young Japanese student.Footnote ²³ This will be the task for the first half of my article.

To consider processes of intellectual negotiation and reconfiguration also demands that we have a better understanding of what happened between the publication of Inagaki's English-language monograph in 1890 and his Japanese-language articulation of the ‘Pacific age’ in 1892: this constitutes my article's second half. For, in fact, the ‘transference’ that culminated in Inagaki's articulation of the Pacific age was a good deal less smooth than Korhonen implies. The phrase came out of Inagaki's struggles to translate – linguistically and conceptually – his understanding of Seeley's work for a Japanese readership. It therefore follows that the ‘Pacific age’ was not the endpoint of Inagaki's thinking but merely a port of call. The bigger journey was towards an understanding of Japan's place in a world of current and future Great Power rivalries – and thus towards a positioning of Japan in historical time. The ‘Pacific age’ was an articulation of this future moment, but it was only one formulation of a bigger temporal narrative which was emerging in Japan by the early 1890s, namely expansion. It was in the discursive space between the histories of Seeley and the work of prominent writers such as Tokutomi Sohō 徳富蘇峰 (1863–1957) that Inagaki wrote about the significance of the Pacific Ocean to the Japanese nation. Indeed, as I shall show, the lesser-known figure of Inagaki was very likely the key mediator between Seeley's 1883 The expansion of England and Tokutomi's 1894 On the expansion of greater Japan – a mediation that Tokutomi scholars have hitherto overlooked.

In other words, as Joan Judge has observed for the ways in which European pasts were discussed in early twentieth-century China, non-Japanese ideas such as those of Seeley ‘did not supplant an existing conceptual universe’. Instead, in thinking about how history was made between Europe and East Asia, scholars could start by acknowledging how ideas were translated into ‘the historical lexicon of that universe’. As Judge argues, it is therefore essential for us to understand this ‘host’ language – in our case, the language of Japanese expansionism in the late nineteenth century – so as to decode how foreign ideas were appropriated and assimilated. Thus, ‘a grasp of the concrete micro-processes through which Western ideas were mediated is essential to our understanding of the more abstract macro-processes of ideational translation’.Footnote ²⁴ To reconstruct these micro-processes, I draw on a methodology of ‘sites of citation’ – thinking not only about where and when Inagaki articulated his ideas but also how, in his engagement with Seeley, he projected The expansion of England onto the discursive site of the Pacific Ocean.Footnote ²⁵ In these ways, I hope both to build on Korhonen's work in disentangling an understudied element of late nineteenth-century Japanese oceanic rhetoric, and also to demonstrate the longer life of The expansion of England beyond the Anglo-American world in which it is usually studied. Thus, this is not a case study of wholesale transference from Europe to East Asia, but rather of histories constructed in migrations between the two.

II

Like all good stories, this one begins in Switzerland. Circa 1881, two Cambridge dons were holidaying in the mountains. At some point, one, John Robert Seeley (of Gonville and Caius College), announced to the other, Oscar Browning (of King's College, 1837–1923), that he had been visited with the idea for a new book. Browning recalled, ‘I remember [Seeley] coming to me one morning full of the scheme which had been revealed to him the evening before, treating it as if it were something outside himself, and as if he dreaded the responsibility which had been laid upon him to work it out.’Footnote ²⁶ We can only speculate on whether it was the heady air of Swiss federalism that provided the crucial intellectual spark to Seeley, himself a renowned imperial federalist;Footnote ²⁷ at any rate, the dreaded scheme was to bring him worldwide renown.

Delivered as a series of undergraduate lectures in the autumn of 1881 and spring of 1882, and published largely without revision in 1883, The expansion of England laid out Seeley's philosophy of history through a consideration of the English past since approximately the sixteenth century. History, he argued, should ‘pursue a practical object’; an overview of English history ‘should state some conclusion to which it leads’. He claimed that ‘since the future grows out of the past, the history of the past of England ought to give rise to a prophecy concerning her future’.Footnote ²⁸ But the historical progress of the English state was not simply towards liberty and democracy. Instead, it was characterized by a trend more conspicuous, if hitherto understudied: ‘I mean the simple obvious fact of the extension of the English name into other countries of the globe, the foundation of Greater Britain.’ And then, in one of his most oft-cited observations, he added: ‘There is something very characteristic in the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’Footnote ²⁹

Thus, the title of Seeley's first lecture (and chapter), ‘Tendency in English history’, referred to ‘the tendency to expansion which England has so long displayed’.Footnote ³⁰ This was a tendency that Seeley identified by rethinking popular narratives of English history in the eighteenth century across the temporal divisions of monarchical reigns. Instead, he urged his listeners/readers to think of what he called England's ‘foreign wars’ (he calculated that there were seven between 1688 and 1815) as part of a single historical phenomenon. To the extent that he was thus bundling previously disparate histories into a single concept, namely expansion, Seeley was engaged in the practice of colligation. ‘Colligation’ literally means ‘to tie, group, or join together’. Within the practice of history, it refers to the act of ‘integrat[ing] units of information to form something new and to thus create novel historiographical information, which cannot be thought to have existed before this act of creation’; in other words, it denotes the act of historiographical synthesis.Footnote ³¹ Seeley did not articulate his approach using this language; but he did talk of the ‘rearrangement’ of historical events and of ‘a new principle of grouping’. This enabled him to break down his bigger story – expansion – into new temporal phases, during which the history of England, far from being centred on parliamentary debates in Westminster, expanded into greater Britain and thus incorporated colonies as different as Canada or India.Footnote ³²

Although Seeley did not intend it, his act of historiographical rearrangement, and his insistence on the relationship between the past and the future – ‘on the question whether Greater Britain, now that it exists, may be expected to prosper and endure or to fall’Footnote ³³ – would later facilitate the modulation of his ideas into a Japanese context, even before The expansion of England was itself translated. But notwithstanding the potential for Seeley's historiographical strategies to travel, we should first simply note that his book touched a nerve within late Victorian Britain and beyond. Admirers of The expansion of England included such luminaries as the then prime minister William Gladstone (who had been influential in securing for Seeley the Regius professorship of history at Cambridge in 1869), Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, and Lord Tennyson. The book sold some 80,000 copies in the first two years after its publication,Footnote ³⁴ and we may safely assume that one of those copies belonged to a young Japanese student who arrived to study in Cambridge in 1885.

Inagaki Manjirō was the second son of a samurai retainer in the western domain of Hirado, not far from Nagasaki. In its sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century heyday, Hirado had been one of the most important trade entrepôts in East Asia – a hub for Chinese, Dutch, and (for ten years) English traders.Footnote ³⁵ Though the domain fell into serious economic difficulties after the promulgation of the Tokugawa shogunate's so-called ‘closed country’ edicts, never to regain its former glory, it had nevertheless become a key centre of Dutch learning and translation by the early nineteenth century. Indeed, Hirado's bibliophile daimyo (lord) Matsura Kiyoshi 松浦清 (1760–1841) came to amass one of the largest collections of Western texts in the Tokugawa realm.Footnote ³⁶ The extent to which this intellectual hinterland played a role in the development of Inagaki's subsequent thought remains a topic for future research. Later scholars would label him one of the ‘Hirado triumvirate’, a group that included the writers Suganuma Teifū 菅沼貞風 (1865–89) and Ura Kei'ichi 浦敬一 (1860–89).Footnote ³⁷ Inagaki wrote less explicitly about his home domain than Suganuma, whose posthumous 1892 monograph on the commercial history of greater Japan included a 135-page appendix, A history of Hirado trade.Footnote ³⁸ But as we shall shortly see, Hirado may have coloured his reading of recent British imperial history; and, in the second half of the 1880s, the domain remained part of his daily life, owing to the fact that Inagaki was asked to accompany Matsura Atsushi 松浦厚 (1864–1934), son of the last Hirado daimyo and great-great-grandson of Matsura Kiyoshi, when Atsushi was sent to study at the University of Cambridge in August 1885.Footnote ³⁹

In today's age of international student exchanges, it is perhaps difficult for us to imagine the challenges faced by Inagaki, Matsura, and the other handful of Japanese students at Cambridge in the 1880s to ‘fit in’ to university life. As Greg Dening has documented, the language and customs of the university could be quite alien even to a young man from nearby East Anglia – in this case, the future astronomer William Gooch (1770–92), who came to Cambridge in 1788 and encountered for the first time the Tripos and hoi polloi, the wranglers, the Senate House examinations, and sizars.Footnote ⁴⁰ If this was a lexicon bewildering to the son of a Norfolk barber in the late 1780s, then it must have been all the more so to the son of a Hirado retainer in the late 1880s. (‘Tripos’, ‘Senate House’, and ‘hoi polloi’ bewildered even a don's son growing up in Cambridge in the late 1980s – but enough about him.) Cambridge was in a period of transition during Inagaki's years, however: in 1887, in response to the presence of not only Japanese but also Indian undergraduates, the university senate voted to allow students from Asia to take their examinations in English and not Greek.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, Indians in late Victorian Britain, though small in number, constituted a significant element of the popular English imagination of the world beyond Britain,Footnote ⁴² and it was exactly this imagination of the ‘greater Britain’ – of the historical and contemporary significance of the colonies in particular – that lay behind Seeley's famous book.

Inagaki got to study under Seeley's tutorage in 1888, when he entered Gonville and Caius College (which was also William Gooch's alma mater). Two years later, armed with his examination-tested English, he published his first monograph and completed his studies in Cambridge. Based on one of his two graduation theses,Footnote ⁴³ Japan and the Pacific, and a Japanese view of the Eastern Question was dedicated to Seeley, and the book's second part (‘The Eastern Question’) drew especially on The expansion of England and Seeley's ‘A short history of Napoleon the First’ (1886).Footnote ⁴⁴ But, as Lord Knutsford wrote to Inagaki, ‘the first part of the book is to me the most interesting. I prefer to consider the important part which Japan will play in the history of the future to looking back to the history of the past, the Crimean War, & the action of Port Manning.’Footnote ⁴⁵ As for Knutsford, so for us: it is in part one, Japan and the Pacific, that Inagaki's interpretation and application of Seeley's ideas is most original; equally, this part would be central to Inagaki's subsequent articulation of his Pacific-related ideas in Japanese.

Inagaki opens Japan and the Pacific with a Seeley-esque sentence of prophecy and periodization – a chronosophy, as it were: ‘Without doubt the Pacific will in the coming century be the platform of commercial and political enterprise.’Footnote ⁴⁶ He continues: ‘This truth, however, escapes the eyes of ninety-nine out of a hundred, just as did the importance of Eastern Europe in 1790, and of Central Asia in 1857.’Footnote ⁴⁷ And with that, the reader is thrust into a historical overview of what Inagaki takes to be the great geopolitical rivalry of the nineteenth century, between England on the one hand and Russia on the other. (Seeley had similarly framed his analysis of the eighteenth century in terms of the great rivalry between England and France; he touched on the nineteenth-century rivalry between England and Russia only briefly in his penultimate chapter.) Inagaki's argument is that, across the 1800s, the English–Russian rivalry had gradually moved eastwards, from Crimea to Persia and even to the Second Opium War (1856–60), which Inagaki argues provoked Russia into agreeing (with China) its acquisition of Vladivostok in 1858 and (with Japan) of Sakhalin in 1859. It was this growing Russian influence in the north Pacific, plus ‘many other circumstances’, which ‘caused England to perceive the necessity of having a naval depot and commercial harbour on the Tong Hai [i.e. the East China Sea] and on the Yellow Sea’.Footnote ⁴⁸

At this point, having given his readers a whirlwind tour of the ‘Great Game’ in less than ten pages, Inagaki devotes the next seven pages to a relatively minor incident in European imperial history, namely the British occupation of Port Hamilton (Geomundo Island), off the southern coast of Korea, between 1885 and 1887.Footnote ⁴⁹ The importance of this occupation to Inagaki's worldview is suggested by the fact that, after his return to Japan in 1891, one of his first published essays was devoted to what he called Britain's ‘illegal’ (fuhō 不法) actions in Port Hamilton.Footnote ⁵⁰ Exactly what triggered his interest in this particular episode is unclear. Perhaps it was the incident's timing, during Inagaki's first two years in Cambridge, such that he had to confront the disjuncture between abstract discussions of ‘greater Britain’ in university lecture halls and imperial realpolitik in his backyard. Perhaps it was the fact that Port Hamilton really was in Inagaki's backyard (Geomundo Island, less than two hundred kilometres from Hirado as the bird flies, was the closest Korean territory to Inagaki's home domain): here we see one possible influence of Hirado on Inagaki's writing. Perhaps it was an indirect way of questioning the diet of international-relations-as-gentlemanly-relations that Inagaki, as a founder member of the Japanese Club at Cambridge (established 1888), was fed in some of his extracurricular activities.Footnote ⁵¹

Whatever the reason, Port Hamilton was crucial to Inagaki's understanding of the Pacific Ocean more generally. In his 1891 Japanese essay, he insisted that one must understand the regional politics of this small Korean island in terms of its Pacific Ocean aspect (Taiheiyō no kyokumen yori mite 太平洋の局面より見て); and the notion of examining ‘general tendencies in the Pacific’ (Taiheiyō no taiseijō 太平洋の大勢上) is one of the essay's key refrains.Footnote ⁵² In his 1890 English monograph, Inagaki's lengthy discussion of Port Hamilton, in which he methodically counters British government justifications for the occupation, serves to preface his central argument that ‘Without doubt Japan is the Key of the Pacific’.Footnote ⁵³

Although this Port Hamilton discussion may be easy to overlook, the prism that the incident offered Inagaki to understanding Japan's relationship to the Pacific was particularly original. In his focus on ‘the Pacific’, he was insisting on the ocean as a site of history – a place whose ‘aspect’ must be considered in world affairs – rather than as an empty vast space to be crossed in any journey between Asia and North America. And if Japan was ‘the key’ to this site, then it followed that any historical discussion of the Pacific must involve Japan, and vice versa. In this sense, Port Hamilton was a moment in the very recent British past that served to highlight the centrality of Japan to any world history narrative which would encompass Asia, British–Russian rivalry, and the Pacific Ocean ‘in the coming century’. We are not yet at the articulation of an age, but already Inagaki's understanding of the Pacific is taking shape.

A few pages later, Inagaki cites Seeley for the first time – in the context not of political power but of commerce. In a short exposition on the geography and history of Japan (referencing the defeat of the Mongol invaders in 1281, the conquest of Korea by Hideyoshi Toyotomi in the 1590s, and the subjugation of Taiwanese indigenous peoples in 1873), Inagaki writes: ‘Look at a map of the world – the country lies between two of the largest commercial nations, viz., the United States and China …’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here, he footnotes a sentence from The expansion of England in which Seeley had observed the ‘two gigantic neighbours’ of the ‘English world-empire’, namely the United States and Russia. At first sight, Seeley's observation was seemingly a comment on the spatial organization of the world. In fact, however, it came in a chapter in which he proffered three different phases in the history of greater Britain: the first from the end of Elizabeth I's reign to the eighteenth century, the second the eighteenth century itself, and the third, that of England as a world empire with two gigantic neighbours.Footnote ⁵⁵ As I have already noted, the division of time was central to Seeley's ‘rearrangement’ of historical narratives, whether in ‘phases’, ‘tracts of time’, ‘periods’, ‘epochs’, ‘moments’, or ‘stages’.Footnote ⁵⁶

That Inagaki understands Seeley's ‘gigantic neighbours’ comment to be a temporal observation is suggested by the fact that he quickly moves to a second citation from The expansion of England. Here, Seeley had drawn on the work of the German geographer Carl Ritter to posit three stages of civilization: ‘the potemic which clings to rivers, the thalassic, which grows up around inland seas, and lastly the oceanic’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The impact of the New World, according to Seeley, was that it had spurred Europe to pass from the thalassic to the oceanic stage of history, a ‘transformation’ that for England had begun with the Elizabethan age and taken true form in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Inagaki cites Seeley, in turn citing Ritter, and then suggests that, owing to Watt and Stephenson, the railway constitutes another stage of general civilization, such that ‘it seems also to me that we might call the present era “the railway-oceanic”’.Footnote ⁵⁹ From railways, Inagaki moves to commerce, to the Japanese as ‘born sailors’, to the need for Japan to hold a closer relationship with Australia, and then to a final overview of the English position in the Pacific, and the likelihood of Japan at some point finding itself as lying between future combatants.

Inagaki's proposal of a new civilizational stage demonstrates the extent to which Seeley coloured his geopolitical imagination of Japan's place in the world, and thus in world history. The idea of historical stages was of course not exclusive to Seeley and Ritter: Inagaki would have known Fukuzawa Yukichi's An outline of a theory of civilization (itself drawing on Henry Thomas Buckle and François Guizot), which similarly posited three stages of world civilization.Footnote ⁶⁰ But Seeley was present in the binary framework of great power rivalry, which was a prelude to Inagaki's explaining Japan's key presence in the Pacific. Seeley was also present in Inagaki's own interest in stages and phases of history –and, concomitantly, in the idea that the past should explain something of the future. Inagaki did not use the term ‘expansion’ in his book, but The expansion of England's arguments pervade his work. They explain his interest in historical moments, such as the British occupation of Port Hamilton; and they are there in the other ways he discusses temporality, be it in terms of chronology (‘the coming century’) or phases of history.

In Japan and the Pacific, however, Inagaki's interest in the past had yet to coalesce into a single colligation. His articulation of a future age would, in fact, emerge from the problem of translation – from the question of how to make his ideas (which for five years he had been formulating in English) speak to an audience of his Japanese peers.

III

In November 1895, Inagaki Manjirō rose to deliver a lecture for the Tōhō Kyōkai 東邦協会 (Oriental Society), in Tokyo, called ‘The evolution of military campaigns: general tendencies and applications’.Footnote ⁶¹ Published several months later by the Min'yūsha company, the lecture offers multiple ways of understanding Inagaki's new audience and, consequently, the extent to which his thinking had developed in the five years after his departure from Cambridge. Indeed, this was a key period in Japan's relations with the Asia-Pacific world: on the one hand, the Meiji government had emerged victorious from the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5); on the other, its ability to send additional labourers across the Pacific had been threatened, both by the rise of anti-Japanese campaigns in California (1892–4) and by white sugar planters in Hawaiʻi overthrowing the monarchy and establishing a republic in which Asians were now denied citizenship (1893–4).Footnote ⁶²

Like much of Inagaki's work, the 1895 lecture seems unburdened by any desire for concision. After explaining that his aim is to trace the historical transformation of military campaigns up to the nineteenth century, he offers a detailed overview of world history according to four types of ‘ambition’ (he uses the phonetic katakana syllabary): personal, family, state, and finally ‘national ambition’ – a section which begins with Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War. The Napoleonic wars served as the transition to the fifth stage, he continues, which was marked by a greater emphasis on ‘humanity’ – as evidenced by Wilberforce's abolition of the slave trade, the expansion of global commerce, technological innovation, and so on, including what Inagaki terms ‘world peace’.Footnote ⁶³ This meant that the use of military campaigns for the newly victorious Japan in 1895 became a question of the nation's ‘responsibility’ to maintain peace in East Asia, and, through peace, to cultivate world civilization.Footnote ⁶⁴ To fulfil this ‘duty to the world’, Inagaki called for a state policy of ‘military expansion’ (gunbi kakuchō 軍備拡張), so as to attain for Japan a position of supremacy in East Asia, alongside a concomitant expansion of diplomatic power. Moreover, it would be crucial for Japan to advance in commerce and industry as part of its ‘national interest’ in Asia and in the Pacific. This would involve the opening and development of commercial ports, if necessary using a British-style ‘gunboat diplomacy’. That is, Inagaki envisioned Japan opening shipping lines to support new trading bases both on the Asian continent and in the ‘Southern Seas’ and America, because, he claimed, ‘With the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway and the [prospective] opening of the Nicaraguan canal, today's world is no longer in the Atlantic age but is surely moving into the Pacific age.’Footnote ⁶⁵

In the ‘Pacific age’, we have the fullest expression of a Seeley-esque temporal colligation. First, it was a phrase which tied together multiple strands of thought in early 1890s Japan, from overseas trade to gunboat diplomacy to stages of civilizational evolution. Second, it appeared in the ‘application’ section of Inagaki's lecture, as if nodding to Seeley's belief that history should pursue ‘a practical object’. (Indeed, in a further nod to Seeley, the other key term in Inagaki's subtitle, taisei 大勢, was annotated to be phonetically pronounced as ‘general tendency’, perhaps recalling the first chapter of The expansion of England.) And, just as Seeley had framed historical expansion in terms of England's ‘transformation’, so Inagaki similarly placed transformations (hensen 変遷) in military expansionism at the heart of his historical analysis.Footnote ⁶⁶ In all of these ways, we can think of Inagaki as entering into a duet with Seeley's ideas.

But – to continue the musical metaphor – Inagaki's 1895 lecture should in fact be considered a modulation of The expansion of England into new keys rather than a straight transposition from one stave to another. For if this had been a simple case of what Korhonen calls ‘transference’, we might wonder why the student did not articulate the ‘Pacific age’ while writing his 1890 monograph in Cambridge – when, presumably, the ‘guidance’ of the professor was greatest. In fact, Inagaki did not arrive at this formulation until 1892, when he published a sequel to his own Tōhōsaku ippen 東方策一編 (Eastern policy, volume i). This 1891 book had been, in loose terms, an expanded translation of Japan and the Pacific, as we shall shortly see. The sequel, A draft with conclusions about Eastern policy (1892), built on Inagaki's previous groundwork. Its preface articulated for the first time the transition from ‘Mediterranean age’ to ‘Atlantic age’, and then to the world being on the verge of a ‘Pacific age’ (that is, the formulation to which Inagaki would return in 1895).Footnote ⁶⁷ But, whereas Eastern policy had focused on history, now – in September 1892 – was the time to discuss policies. In other words, Inagaki's first articulation of the ‘Pacific age’ was prompted by his concern to address the practical challenges faced by the early 1890s Japanese state, which for him ranged from commercial and industrial policy to military policy and international law. This suggests, in turn, that the intellectual environment of early 1890s Japan was as important to the development of Inagaki's thought as Seeley's ideas. To return to Joan Judge's formulation, this early 1890s environment therefore constituted Japan's ‘existing conceptual universe’ – a universe which already had its own distinctive ways of using the past.

Rather than asking how Inagaki ‘introduced’ Seeley to Japan, therefore, we might first question the extent to which stars from this universe could be seen in the Cambridge skies during the period 1885–90. On the one hand, there seems little evidence that Inagaki read contemporary Japanese works during his student days. Based on Japan and the Pacific alone, his interlocutors included not only Seeley but also Oscar Browning, the King's College historian who had been present during Seeley's Swiss revelation, and whom Inagaki thanked in his preface; and Thomas Erskine Holland (1835–1926), whose work he acknowledged as having consulted ‘specially for the history of treaties’.Footnote ⁶⁸ (The admiration was mutual: upon receiving a copy of Japan and the Pacific, Holland wrote, ‘You have done good service in impressing upon us that beyond and behind our old “Eastern Question” there lies a Pacific Question, in the solution of which your wonderful country must play a leading part, and which it is now high time for us to study seriously.’Footnote ⁶⁹) Elsewhere in his monograph, Inagaki cited historians of Russia and of the French empire, and biographies of Lord Palmerston and Richard Cobden, in addition to primary sources. All the cited authors were male and wrote in English.

On the other hand, the intellectual environment for Japanese students in late 1880s Cambridge seems to have been such that, even if Inagaki had been reading his Japanese peers, his citation of their work might not have been widely welcomed. As we have already seen, he was a founder member of the Japanese Club at Cambridge, whose stated object was to study both the ‘qualities of the English Gentlemen’ and ‘how and where the high character of the English Gentleman is produced; and, having ascertained that certain qualities are possessed by the English Gentleman, to enquire into the best means of cultivating among ourselves the like qualities’. Part of this cultivation included, in February 1890, a lecture by the Rev. Prof. B. G. Westcott, DD (of King's College) on ‘The influence of Christianity upon the character of the English gentleman’ – a lecture structured around the question of what ‘does Christianity bring to the education of the English Gentleman which Confucius cannot bring’.Footnote ⁷⁰ If the considered position of a Cambridge don was that there were certain things even Confucius could not bring to the educational table, then we may have an insight into why Inagaki chose not to cite contemporary Japanese-language scholarship in Japan and the Pacific – assuming that he had access to such scholarship.

That Inagaki may actually have had some ongoing connection to intellectual trends in his homeland is suggested elsewhere in the Japanese Club's minutes. It was mentioned in the December 1890 meeting that Inagaki had previously hosted a visit to Cambridge by ‘Count Tokugawa’, whose identity is otherwise unknown. Later, it was reported that Kikuchi Dairoku 菊池大麓 (1855–1917), himself a Cambridge graduate, often sent letters from Tokyo to Inagaki's close friend, the Rev. C. E. Searle: ‘There is hardly one in which there is not some reference to Mr. Inagaki's proceedings at home and to the interest with which his proceedings are watched there.’Footnote ⁷¹ Visitors and letters, then, were two ways in which Inagaki might have kept abreast of new work being published in Japan. Other mediators may have been his fellow students in the Japanese Club. Soejima Michimasa 副島道正 (1871–1948), who arrived in 1888 to study at the Leys School but later read history at the university, was the third son of Soejima Taneomi 副島種臣 (1828–1905), the former foreign minister of Japan and member of the privy council; and Matsura Atsushi, whom Inagaki accompanied to Cambridge in 1885, may well have provided another link to what was happening back in Hirado.Footnote ⁷²

Indeed, events in Hirado were emblematic of a shift in the ways that intellectuals in Japan were – in the same way as Inagaki in Cambridge – seeking to understand their country's place in the world in the late 1880s. In 1888, for example, the aforementioned Suganuma Teifū returned to Hirado from his studies at the University of Tokyo bearing a copy of a novella, Tale of a dream of Hankai (1886), co-authored by Sugiura Shigetake 杉浦重剛 (1855–1924) and Fukumoto Nichinan 福本日南 (1857–1921). The novella imagined a fictional land, clearly resembling the Spanish Philippines, to which a group from Japan's outcaste community planned to emigrate. Enthused by this vision of southward expansion, Suganuma himself decided to prepare for such a mass emigration of his Hirado compatriots by going to the Philippines with Fukumoto.Footnote ⁷³ There, in 1889, he met an untimely death, but his vision of southward expansion chimed with the expansionist maritime visions of other journalists such as Taguchi Ukichi 田口卯吉 (1855–1905) or Shiga Shigetaka 志賀重昂 (1863–1927), whose report of his ten-month expedition to the south Pacific had been published in 1887.Footnote ⁷⁴ Fukumoto himself would maintain Suganuma's vision by posthumously publishing his friend's monograph on the commercial history of greater Japan. In his preface, Fukumoto drew on the rich pre-Tokugawa history of Hirado to imagine a world in which, in the absence of the maritime restrictions from the 1630s onwards, the promise of the early shogunate's ‘red seal ships’ system had been allowed to continue, leading to the raising of the Japanese flag in ‘every port under the sun’ and general national prosperity.Footnote ⁷⁵

As this one example shows, there was therefore a group of writers in the late 1880s – a ‘literary network’ including Shiga Shigetaka, Taguchi Ukichi, Sugiura Shigetake, Fukumoto Nichinan, and Suganuma Teifū – whose publications were inspired by concerns similar to those exercising Inagaki in Cambridge, namely how to place Japan and its past into global economic and political space.Footnote ⁷⁶ In other words, even before Inagaki ‘introduced’ Seeley's ideas to a Japanese audience, there was a pre-existing set of debates about maritime expansion, some of which looked back to Japan's own history of engagement in South-east Asia (as previously mentioned, this was what Akira Iriye termed the ‘indigenous tradition’ of Japanese expansionism). For many of these writers, moreover, Japan's ongoing colonization of Hokkaido and future expansion to the south were two sides of the same coin, driven as they were by the idea that overpopulation at home could be relieved by the settlement of Japanese overseas.Footnote ⁷⁷

That Inagaki's 1891 book, Eastern policy, became a commercial success (its fifth edition appeared in 1894) suggests that he quickly learned how to speak to this audience. Partly this was a question of exposure. One Tokyo-based crowd with which he mixed was the Oriental Society, in whose journal, in November 1891, he published his article on international law and the Port Hamilton incident. The society's establishment had coincided with Inagaki's return to Japan six months earlier, and its founding members included Soejima Taneomi (father of Inagaki's Cambridge friend) and the aforementioned writer Fukumoto Nichinan.Footnote ⁷⁸ Inagaki himself was listed as a member for the first time in October 1891, and by 1895 he was the society's secretary-general. As the journal's first issues demonstrate, the members’ eclectic interests were a perfect fit with those of Inagaki: there were articles on Australia, on overseas migration, on the Ogasawara, Kuril, and Yaeyama islands, and on the comparative strength of the Japanese navy, all alongside translations of the French colonial advocate Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843–1916), and much more.Footnote ⁷⁹ That Inagaki chose to give his expanded translation of Japan and the Pacific a Japanese title – Tōhōsaku (東方策, Eastern policy) – which spoke directly to the society's interest both in ‘the Orient’ and in government policy may be considered an astute piece of marketing.

A second crowd with which Inagaki ingratiated himself was that associated with the Min'yūsha publishing house, led by his almost exact contemporary Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957). Tokutomi had risen to public prominence during Inagaki's absence with the publication of his bestselling book, Shōrai no Nihon 将来之日本 (The future Japan), in 1886. As Christopher Hill has noted, this was an extended conversation with Herbert Spencer's Political institutions (1882), focusing particularly on the question of whether Japan could be restored to the ‘general [global] tendencies’ of social and societal development, notwithstanding its divergence from these tendencies during the Tokugawa period.Footnote ⁸⁰ This is not the place for an extended analysis of the similarities between Tokutomi's 1886 book and Inagaki's Japan and the Pacific, but the extent to which the two authors addressed the same questions is striking: the interest in general historical ‘tendencies’ (taisei); the focus on what Lord Knutsford termed ‘the history of the future’; and thus the sense that both Tokutomi and Inagaki placed ‘the European past and the Japanese future into an allegorical relationship in which it [was] possible to read one through the other’.Footnote ⁸¹ Again, we might question whether Inagaki's early interest in ‘the coming century’ and in historical tendencies was exclusively the result of his having imbibed Seeley's call for history to ‘modify [the reader's] view of the present and his forecast of the future’.Footnote ⁸² If Tokutomi's star was another that Inagaki could see from Cambridge, then this would reinforce my suspicion that Japan and the Pacific, and its subsequent translations into Japanese, were partly informed by Inagaki's engagement with contemporary Japanese intellectual trends even during his years of overseas study.

If Inagaki had indeed read Tokutomi while studying in Cambridge, then perhaps it is not surprising that he initiated contact between the two in July 1891, shortly after his return to Japan.Footnote ⁸³ In his first letter, he referred to a submission he had made to Tokutomi's newspaper, The Nation's Friend, which Tokutomi had founded with the proceeds earned by The future Japan. Inagaki's essay, ‘The Japanese nation and international law’, was subsequently published on 23 July 1891,Footnote ⁸⁴ marking the beginning of a relationship with Tokutomi and with his Min'yūsha publishing house that lasted at least until the publication of Inagaki's lecture in 1895, and which therefore spanned a crucial period in the development of Tokutomi's thought. For, as the story usually goes, Tokutomi's worldview underwent a transformation in the early 1890s, from liberal ‘friend of the people’ (民友, min'yū) to – in the words of his numerous critics – oligarchy-supporting ‘friend of the government’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Accordingly, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1894 was one factor in this ‘conversion’. At the height of the war, in December 1894, Tokutomi published On the expansion of greater Japan, a book which predicted Japan's victory and which called for a much more militant form of Japanese overseas imperialism than that which he had previously espoused.

As Hill and others have argued, however, to overemphasize this ‘conversion’ is to ignore the extent to which Tokutomi had been interested in the state as a key historical player in The future Japan.Footnote ⁸⁶ Moreover, Tokutomi had signalled his interest in expansion in a piece he wrote for The Nation's Friend in June 1890, entitled ‘A new homeland for the Japanese race’. What was significant about Tokutomi's article was its call for expansion in all but name. He lauded the Chinese race for being ‘an expansive people (kōdai naru jinmin 広大なる人民) living in an expansive empire (kōdai naru teikoku 広大なる帝国)’. He lamented that, even in Hokkaido, colonization was proceeding slowly, while elsewhere, the Japanese overseas population comprised only ten thousand labourers in Hawaiʻi, two to three thousand students in San Francisco, and prostitutes in Hong Kong and Singapore. (Sanuki Jūkichi, with whom I began this article, arrived in Australia from Hawaiʻi two weeks after Tokutomi's article was published.) In calling for policies to promote overseas migration (gaikoku ijū 外國移住), Tokutomi talked of the ‘spread’ of the Japanese race (man'en 蔓延), the need to make Japanese ‘venture overseas’ (kaigai ni yūhi seshimuru 海外に雄飛せしむる), and the imperative to ‘open a new empire’ (shin-teikoku wo hiraku 新帝国を開く). Nowhere, however, did he use the term in the title of his 1894 book, ‘expansion’ (bōchō).Footnote ⁸⁷

This is significant because there seems to have been a subtle shift in how the idea of ‘expansion’ was expressed in the Japanese language in the period 1890–4. When, in his 1891 Eastern policy, Inagaki acknowledged Seeley's Expansion of England, he translated ‘expansion’ as kakuchō 拡張.Footnote ⁸⁸ This aligned with a tendency for writers to use kakuchō when discussing commercial expansion and Japanese emigration. For example, the eminent Fukuzawa Yukichi had argued, a few months before Inagaki's return to Japan, that ‘The reason that English commerce prospers is due to there being so many Englishmen all over the world. In Japan, too, in order to expand (kakuchō 拡張) trade and commerce with foreign countries, we first need to have our people settle far and wide in foreign lands ….’Footnote ⁸⁹ And again, in January 1893, Fukuzawa examined the relationship between the ‘expansion’ of overseas shipping lines and Japanese trade and commerce.Footnote ⁹⁰ In this use of kakuchō, Fukuzawa was by no means exceptional: through the 1880s, the term was used both in a material context (the expansion of the railways, telegraph lines, commerce) and, more abstractly, in terms of rights, duties, and laws.Footnote ⁹¹

When Tokutomi came to write On the expansion of greater Japan, however, he rendered ‘expansion’ with the characters bōchō 膨張, not kakuchō. In the book's opening chapter, which was originally published as a stand-alone essay in June 1894, Tokutomi turned once again to history, and to the idea that Japan had diverged from its true historical identity during the Tokugawa period. If the history of the last few hundred years had been a history of contraction (shūshuku 収縮), he argued, then the history of coming centuries must be one of expansion (bōchō no rekishi 膨張の歴史). In this scheme, the stories of Japan's mythical age referred to seas, islands, ships, vessels, whales, and sharks – all related to the maritime world (remember Inagaki's characterization of the Japanese as ‘born sailors’). By contrast, the stories of China's mythical age looked back to the territorial – to celestial pillars, the land, carts, horses, snakes, or cattle. The Tokugawa shogunate had closed Japan to the world, but now even a farmer could cross the seas to work in Hawaiʻi. There were now Japanese pearl divers working directly below the Southern Star (i.e. in Australia), salmon and trout fishermen in the tributaries of the Amur river, sugar cultivators on volcanic islands (i.e. Hawaiʻi), and farmers in North America; there were Japanese all over the Korean peninsula, and elsewhere in Vladivostok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Queensland. If four and a half centuries were to elapse, and the Pacific waves were to continue to swell, the light of the Southern Star continue to shine, and the warm stream of the Kuroshio current continue to flow, there would be no place without Japanese. ‘Looking to the future,’ Tokutomi wrote, drawing again on tropes of time and on the term bōchō, ‘the age of Japanese expansionism (Nihon bōchō no jidai, 日本膨張の時代) is an unquestionable fact.’Footnote ⁹²

In positing a future Japanese age (jidai) in world history, Tokutomi articulated a concern that was close to Inagaki's heart. Inagaki, indeed, had sent Tokutomi a copy of his A draft with conclusions about Eastern policy, the book in which he first articulated the ‘Pacific age’, in September 1892.Footnote ⁹³ But we also cannot help but notice that Tokutomi's trope of state-centred national expansion (encompassing both commerce and emigration and also race, colonization, and war) was similar to the colligation that Seeley had proposed in The expansion of England. That Seeley was being read in the Min'yūsha publishing house circles by the mid-1890s is well known. Yamaji Aizan 山路愛山 (1865–1917) later recalled that ‘the youth of Japan learned from the late Professor Seeley's The expansion of England about the destiny of races and the potential for imperial development’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yamaji's own encounter with Seeley has been dated to 1897, while the historian Sawada Jirō suggests that Tokutomi probably did not read Seeley until August 1893.Footnote ⁹⁵ But such research overlooks the fact that Japan's pre-eminent expert on Professor Seeley – his own student, Inagaki – was active in Min'yūsha circles from July 1891 onwards, certainly with his own copy of The expansion of England in hand. Through Inagaki's mediation, Seeley was perhaps present in Tokutomi's thinking in exactly the period when Tokutomi began to emphasize a state-centred view of imperial expansion.Footnote ⁹⁶

As for Inagaki, it is worth noting that he did not use the word bōchō to articulate his notion of Japanese expansionism in his 1895 lecture. Instead, like Fukuzawa, he used the term kakuchō when he discussed world commerce, as he did when he also called for a policy of military expansion. Meanwhile, he used a somewhat unusual, technical term for ‘military campaign’ (gaisei 外征), thus arguably distancing himself from the imperial rhetoric of Tokutomi. And yet, in 1899, when Inagaki came to be involved in a part-translation of The expansion of England, the key noun was now rendered bōchō 膨張, thus using the state-centred term for ‘expansion’ most associated with Tokutomi's 1894 book.Footnote ⁹⁷ In other words, if Seeley's work was present in Tokutomi's thinking, then Tokutomi's work was equally present in Inagaki's later translation of Seeley, giving this and subsequent Japanese renderings of The expansion of England a closer alignment to the militant expansionist moment of the Sino-Japanese War than Inagaki's first translation of the title in 1891.

Here was expansionist history co-produced in the discursive spaces between Europe and East Asia – between a particular vision of eighteenth-century Britain and one of twentieth-century Japan, between the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds, and not least between teacher and erstwhile student.

IV

In May 1893, Seeley himself gave a lecture to the Japanese Club at Cambridge. The speech, which survives only in the form of a Japanese summary, outlined how the ‘intrepid race’ of his audience had renounced their own civilization and adopted (saiyō 採用) that of the West. At the request of the club's honorary vice-president, Seeley's task had been to offer some points of reference to the assembled students. But, he said, ‘Concerning Japan's adventurous experiment, I am not sure I can give any points of reference, because there is really no precedent [for such an experiment] in the people of England, bound as they have been by two thousand years of traditions.’Footnote ⁹⁸

Seeley need not have been so coy. As I have argued in this article, his own particular rendering of English history, first published a decade before his Japanese Club speech, offered significant reference points to a group of young Japanese writers in the early 1890s. First and foremost among those who engaged with Seeley's work was Inagaki Manjirō. But there were others too, among them Tokutomi Sohō and latterly Yamaji Aizan, who noted in 1903 that ‘Professor Seeley's depiction of the development of the Anglo-Saxon race is immediately of value in teaching about the future (zento 前途) of the Japanese race.’Footnote ⁹⁹ By 1918, Soejima Michimasa could be added to their number: a founder member of the Japanese Club while still a pupil at the Leys School, Soejima subsequently studied history at Cambridge and, like Inagaki before him, started publishing essays in the journal of the Oriental Society after his return to Japan.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Soejima was involved in the first full translation of The expansion of England into Japanese in 1918: he wrote the preface, contributed the profile of Seeley in the book's appendix, and provided the notes for the summary of Seeley's lecture to the Japanese Club, which he had attended in 1893. Though it was the translator, Katō Seijirō, who noted that ‘the current situation of our Japanese empire, in its internal politics and international relations, in its colonial and maritime enterprises, and in several other respects, has a great deal in common with the situation during the British empire's expansion in the past’, these were sentiments that Soejima would also surely have shared. Katō continued by suggesting that the reader in 1918 might even have the feeling that Seeley's book was analysing contemporary Japan – here, no doubt, thinking of the geopolitical opportunities for his country that would accompany Britain's anticipated victory in the First World War. This desire to read Britain's past into Japan's future may also explain why the translation was reissued in 1931, another pregnant moment in Japanese expansionism. Fifty years after its conception in the Swiss Alps, Seeley's Expansion of England continued to be a point of reference for imperial Japan.

All of this suggests three possible conclusions. First, a global intellectual history of actors such as Seeley needs to be reconstructed well beyond the Anglo-American spatial framework in which his work is usually discussed.Footnote ¹⁰¹ My particular example has focused on Japan, but perhaps future research will uncover similar stories of intellectual engagement with Seeley's ideas in, say, China or South-east Asia. The time frame for such engagement may also force us to read beyond the immediate late nineteenth-century context of this article. What, for example, was the significance of the prominent war sceptic Kiyosawa Kiyoshi noting, in his diary entry for 17 November 1943, that, having read Seeley and understood how ‘the expansion of England took place because it was not built upon war’, he now wanted an answer to the counterfactual question of ‘how it would have been if Japan had not engaged in war at all with China or Russia and, embracing the balance of powers, had set out on an English maritime political policy’.Footnote ¹⁰² In parsing what he took to be Seeley's promotion of pacific imperial expansion, Kiyosawa took home a very different message from that first mediated by Inagaki and then developed by Tokutomi, as if to suggest that Japanese expansionist discourse in the 1890s had in fact been founded on an incorrect reading of Seeley's interpretation of English history.

Second, such a reconstruction equally challenges historians to move beyond a theoretical framework of ‘influence’ or ‘transference’. Yamaji Aizan may have concluded his aforementioned 1903 essay – emphasizing every word – by declaring that ‘The Japanese people need their own Mill and their own Professor Seeley, written in their own national language.’ But as I have shown, Inagaki's early 1890s formulation of the ‘Pacific age’ was already a sophisticated modulation of Seeley's ideas into a Japanese political and historical lexicon; and, by the mid-1890s, the wider discourse of ‘expansion’ (bōchō) had become as much a co-production that drew both on Japan's pre-Tokugawa histories of engagement with South-east Asia and on eighteenth-century British history as it was simply a transference (or ‘import’) from a British to a Japanese context. Indeed, the fact that bōchō had an afterlife, migrating from mid-1890s Japan to late Qing China (see Jonathan Chappell's contribution to this special issue), raises the question of whether ‘national language’ (kokugo 国語) is a useful way of framing the movement of ideas from Europe to and within East Asia. Perhaps, instead, we should think of communities of scholars, conversing across and between national borders, co-producing narratives and terminologies which may have spoken to particular needs in national history-writing but which were profoundly global in their composition.Footnote ¹⁰³

The third conclusion concerns the agents of these historical co-productions. The late 1880s are often seen as a transformative moment in the way that Japanese scholars conceptualized the past, as symbolized by the arrival of Ludwig Rieß (1861–1928) to establish the first department of history at Tokyo Imperial University in 1887. Recent research has emphasized that ‘modern’ historical study in Japan also emerged out of an interplay between German and ‘indigenous’ Japanese practices, particularly when it came to the conceptualization of the archive. But such research still focuses in the main on professional historians as the key players in ‘making history matter’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By contrast, Inagaki's career between the mid-1880s and the late 1890s forces us to consider the importance of writers who used the past to write history as non-professionals – even if, as in Inagaki's case or later Soejima's, they had a high level of historical training from one of the world's best universities. That Inagaki fell between several professional stools – historian, journalist, ‘political economist’, and later diplomat in Thailand and then Spain, before his premature death in 1908 – may explain why his work is less well known both inside and outside Japan. But, for a short period in the 1890s, he also made history matter.

Finally, there are those other agents of Japanese expansionism: men and women like Sanuki Jūkichi. By the mid-1930s, this first generation of pacific transpacific migrants were being lauded by metropolitan writers and bureaucrats as ‘pioneers’ of later Japanese colonial expansionism. This, too, was a specific writing of the past.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But whether Sanuki would have seen his own life in such a way is unknown: in a global intellectual history, these actors remain no easier to cite than to site.