Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Mooring the global archive is an act of historical inversion.Instead of starting from the nation-state and radiating outwards, Martin Dusinberre begins with a single shipthe Yamashiro-maru -and follows the wakes cut by migrants, merchants, and officials across the Pacific world.At first sight, it appears to be the history of this single vessel, built in Newcastle upon Tyne for Japan's Kyōdō Un'yū Kaisha (later NYK) and folded into Meiji ambitions for maritime recognition.It also appears to be the story of the Japanese migrants who sailed aboard it, whose career ran from passages to Hawai'i and Australia to wartime logistics in the Sino-Japanese War, before it was declared 'obsolete and uneconomic' in 1908 and later sold for scrap. 1 But readers soon discover through this ship that Dusinberre, stitch by stitch, unsettles the usual story we tell about modern Japan, that is industrialization at home and empire abroad.Instead, the author insists that migration, contract labour, and maritime infrastructures, long treated as peripheral to Meiji state-building, belong at the centre of that narrative.Recentring migration within modern Japanese history and within the growing literature on the margins of the pre-war Japanese empire, the book offers an oceanic microhistory.It is very much at home in the Cambridge Oceanic Histories series and models a reflexive, often imaginative, materially grounded way to do global history in the digital age, precisely the direction in which much of the field is travelling.Dusinberre names three 'archival traps', familiar to many historians, that the author was caught in and worked his way out of: the lure of writing a ship's 'life' as an object biography; the assumption that 'the global was googleable' given the abundance of digitized material; and the tendency to privilege text while overlooking 1
Source: The Historical Journal
Author: Reyhan Silingar
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Topic: Japanese History and Culture
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7165040445
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