Acknowledgements

I dedicate Mooring the Global Archive to my wife Asuka and our two children. Asuka listened to my madcap idea for a second book one tepid summer evening long before I was finished with the first, but her unwavering belief in the subsequent fifteen years, her suggestions of trips and traps and her laughter at chickens crossing the road, have kept me on some kind of course – even as our worlds were transformed by the arrivals of Noah and Leah. With deepest thanks to you three.

That summer of 2008, the late Ann Waswo’s fortitude helped me get my doctoral thesis over the line, as did her priceless arrangement of the Nissan Institute flat in St Antony’s College (for which Asuka and I additionally thank Roger Goodman and Jane Baker). Also in Oxford, Arthur Stockwin encouraged my early branching into Japanese–Australian relations. For welcoming me to my first job at Newcastle University in August 2008, and for providing a wonderful blend of collegial endeavour and self-deprecation, I thank former colleagues in history and in East Asian studies: in particular, Tim Kirk, Barbara Cochrane, Naomi Standen, Diana Paton, Felix Schulz, Scott Ashley, Andrea Germer and Laura Moretti. That Ben Houston and I effectively only overlapped in Newcastle for eighteen months is one of life’s regrets; that he and Michelle will now rib me for expressing it thus, while also underlining my unfortunate double adverb, reassures me that our friendship has lasted. I thank many other colleagues for acts of friendship in those years. As I started to study the region’s global entanglements, Joan Allen, David Saunders, Henrietta Heald and Marie Conte-Helm offered expert guidance. Ian Buxton shared an invaluable database of British-built NYK ships. My initial archival trip to Hawai‘i, in 2011, was generously funded by a Newcastle University HaSS Faculty Research Grant.

Harald Fuess was the first to introduce me to Heidelberg University’s incomparable Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ by generously inviting me to work on the book as a visiting scholar for the academic year 2011–12. At a conference we organized in 2012, I benefited especially from the expertise of Joshua Fogel, Jan Rüger and Robert Hellyer. The friendship and incredible intellectual curiosity of colleagues in Heidelberg set this book on an entirely new direction. I thank – and occasionally still cuss, for the difficulty of their questions – Joachim Kurtz, David Mervart (now Autonomous University of Madrid), Anna Andreeva (Ghent University), Martin Hofmann, Pablo Blitstein (EHESS), Monica Juneja, Enno Giele, Frank Grüner (Bielefeld University) and Steve Ivings (Kyoto University); my thanks also to Luke Franks, Fabian Drixler, Eric Hayot, Christian Henriot, Charlotte Kroll, Björn-Ole Kamm, Dominic Steavu and Hans Martin Krämer for Cluster conversations. Madeleine Herren has continued to be an interlocutor in the years since she and then I left Heidelberg. Regular Sunday brunches hosted by Joachim and Haipeng, David and Harumi, and Enno and Guo Jue, gave greater succour to sleep-deprived parents than the hosts will ever know, and the mountains of food had the added benefit that Asuka and I only had one – then two – mouths to feed for the rest of the weekend. Our thanks also to Shupin Lang, Nicole Tsuda, and Andrew and Kate Faulkner, and to the Yamamoto and Habe families.

My stay at Heidelberg was extended to 2014 thanks to a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, whose generous funding also supported several archival trips to Japan, Hawai‘i and Australia. Heidelberg students Charlotte Schäfer, Katharina Rode and Rudolph Ng provided invaluable research assistance during this time, as did Joe Barnes in Tokyo. At the Cluster, Roland Wenzlhuemer (now LMU Munich) got me fired up thinking about ship passages back in 2011 and has offered moral and scholarly support ever since. Additional research travel funding for the book came from the Swiss National Science Foundation thanks to a DACH grant which I led with Roland, 2017–20; as part of this project, I also developed a text-based computer game, livesintransit.org, based on material from parts of the book. My grateful thanks to the ‘Lives in Transit’ technical team at Zurich and beyond: Ramun Riklin, Pim Witlox, Daniel McDonald and the Vitamin2 team, plus many other project-support colleagues and testers at UZH, especially Tobias Hodel (now University of Bern).

The questions, encouragement, close readings and critiques from colleagues and students at the University of Zurich since 2015 gave me the space to change direction yet again. Gesine Krüger, Monika Dommann and Simon Teuscher gave me an intellectual home in our weekly Geschichtskontor writing workshop, whose regulars over the years I also thank: in particular, Jan-Friedrich Missfelder (now University of Basel), Christa Wirth (University of Agder), Juliane Schiel (University of Vienna) and Matthieu Leimgruber. Team-teaching with Svenja Goltermann sharpened my thinking about thematic approaches to the history of the modern world; more recently, Roberto Zaugg and Debjani Bhattacharyya have been wonderful interlocutors in thinking about global history methodologies. Beyond the Department of History, Raji Steineck and David Chiavacci were the first colleagues to introduce me to Zurich, while Hans Bjarne Thomsen’s selflessness and optimism – and his introduction to then Johann Jacobs Museum director Roger M. Buergel – led to the exhibition ‘Ein Bild für den Kaiser’ (2018), which itself profoundly shaped Chapter 2. Graham Corkhill and Vic Clarke very kindly agreed to loan the Yamashiro-maru model to the museum, 2015–18. My thanks also to Ana Sobral, Wolfgang Behr and Marianne Hundt for their friendship at UZH, and especially to Anne Kolb, Barbara Welter, Marietta Meier and latterly Barbara Holler for good cheer and professional collegiality during the book’s final stages. For departmental IT support, booming laughter and reminders of Newcastle, I simply have to call Francesco Falone, whose wonderful team, including Ben Fritsche, are second to none. Across the Karl Schmid Strasse in ETHZ, Harald Fischer-Tiné has offered regular conversations about new developments in global history, and I thank members of his team – especially, in the early days, Robert Kramm (now LMU Munich), Bernhard Schär (University of Lausanne), and Patricia Purtschert (University of Bern) – for their warm welcome at our joint research colloquium. But my greatest debt at Zurich has been to my own team over the years, in ways only they will appreciate: Nadja Schorno, David Möller, Gonzalo San Emeterio Cabañes, Lina Zbinden, Tamara Ann Tinner, Birgit Tremml Werner, Helena Jaskov, David Aragai, Rojbaş Feiner, Selina Tuchschmid, Antonia Schulte-Brinkmann, Jonas R?egg and especially Moe Omiya for help in the last push. My grateful thanks to you all, not only for your outstanding assistance but also for making our work fun and rewarding. UZH students and former students have been integral to my thinking and writing, especially those seminar groups to whom I’ve assigned drafts as part of their course reading: my thanks in particular to Fynn Holm (now University of Tübingen), Ulrich Brandenburg, Christina Wild, Maryam Joseph, Yannick Arnold and Dario Willi, and also to Mayumi Arai.

Beyond Zurich, Jordan Sand has cajoled me and brought his own historical sensitivity to the manuscript in ways far beyond the call of friendship, especially during the first Covid-19 lockdown. Mariko Iijima has been a friend and research collaborator supreme, her steadfastness and hospitality extending also to my family. Through Mariko’s generosity, I got to know colleagues in Japan and North America who have also supported me through the years: in particular, Araragi Shinzō, Eiichiro Azuma, David Ambaras, Tsubota-Nakanishi Miki, Mori Akiko, Yaguchi Yujin and Furukawa Toshiaki, plus many of Mariko’s own postgraduate students. Nakamura Naofumi has posed provocative questions over dinner on each of my visits to Tokyo. I am also grateful to Kimura Kenji, Kokaze Hidemasu, John Breen, Takenaka Toru, Okubo Takeharu, Sven Saaler, Bill Wray, Harry Liebersohn, Jürgen Osterhammel and Andrew Gordon for conversations during the project’s early stages, and to Osamu Saito for encouraging me to continue researching Japanese migration history at a crucial juncture in 2012. Conversations with Noelani Arista in Hawai‘i, Switzerland and Britain helped focus the book’s arguments in essential ways, and I am indebted to her students Ami Mulligan and Sarah Kuaiwa. The late Saneo Okada helped me greatly in Hawai‘i in 2011 and 2013, as did Marylou Bradley of the Kaua‘i Historical Society, by email, and most recently Vicky Shen. In Australia, Keiko Tamura, Simon Avenell and Nathan Woolley generously gave their time and advice. In Britain, Christopher Gerteis and Barak Kushner have been unwavering in their support, especially when Chris and I overlapped during an eventful summer in Heidelberg; Zoë Fritz gave advice on hernias (Chapter 5). Sujit Sivasundaram’s friendship and own model of scholarship have been vitalizing, and I look forward to our future collaborations.

I could not have wished for a more wonderful reading group since 2014 than Naoko Shimazu, Lucy Riall and Pieter Judson, and the friends and colleagues, at Yale–NUS College and the European University Institute respectively, into whose circles they have drawn me.

I am particularly grateful to colleagues who invited me to present earlier versions of material that ended up in the following chapters (here acknowledged with their university affiliations at the time of invitation). Chapter 1: Gesa Mackenthun (Rostock University) – and thanks also to Bernd Zittlau; Robert Bickers (University of Bristol); Jun Uchida (Stanford University); thanks also to colleagues from the Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens, Zurich, and to Myriam Spörri. Chapter 2: Naomi Standen (University of Birmingham); Wolfram Manzenreiter (University of Vienna); Aleksandra Kobiljski (INALCO); Cyrian Pitteloud (University of Geneva); Noelani Arista (University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa); Mariko Iijima (Sophia University, Tokyo); Cristiana Bastos and Nic Miller (University of Lisbon); and thanks also to Frances Steel, Tamson Pietsch, Johanna de Schmidt, and Dagmar Bellmann. Chapter 3: Andreas Eckert (re:work, Humboldt University); Roger Goodman (Nissan Institute, University of Oxford); Pol Dalmau (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona); and Cyrus Schayegh (Graduate Institute, Geneva). My thanks also to Brigitta Bernet, Juliane Schiel and Jakob Tanner, to Bill Mihalopoulos, and to Beth Dusinberre for generous comments and encouragement. Chapter 4: James Raven (University of Essex); Gopalan Balachandran and Gareth Austin (Graduate Institute, Geneva); Paul Kreitman and Carol Gluck (Columbia University); Asano Toyomi and Umemori Naoyuki (Waseda University), plus also Sayaka Chatani. My thanks to David Ambaras for commenting on an earlier draft of Chapter 5, as also Roland Wenzlhuemer. Chapter 6: Ian Jared Miller and David Howell (Harvard University), plus also Nadin Hée, Stefan Huebner and Bill Tsutsui; Helen Macnaughton (SOAS, University of London); my thanks also to Penny Francks, Julia Adeney Thomas and Ryan Tucker Jones, all of whom encouraged me to keep going with coal. Despite these many helping hands, and with apologies to anyone I may have overlooked, all errors are mine.

Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press gave me wonderfully detailed and constructive feedback in 2021–2. Lucy Rhymer encouraged me from early on and managed the whole editorial process expertly; I am grateful to her CUP colleagues Stephanie Taylor, Sari Wastell, Emily Plater and Rosa Martin for managing production, and to Cheryl Hutty for impeccable copyediting. I thank all the immensely helpful staff at the institutions listed under ‘Archives, Museums and Libraries’, many of whom went the extra mile to help me; and I gratefully acknowledge all permission to reproduce images (for details, see individual captions). A Swiss National Science Foundation grant (10BP12_214505/1) generously supported the Open Access costs in publication. Parts of Chapter 2 were published in a much earlier form in the Journal of Global History (2016) and Historische Anthropologie (2019). The ‘Labouring Bodies’ section of Chapter 3 is a shortened revision of an article published in Historische Anthropologie in 2016. Chapter 5 is a complete reworking of material I first wrote about in the History Workshop Journal (2017).

My parents, Bill and Juliet Dusinberre, and my brother Ed brought their own scholarly inquisitiveness to this project from the beginning, along with regular missives and acts of encouragement. My late grandparents, Merrick and Charlotte, and John and Thea, have been much in mind as I have written, as has my late mother-in-law, Reiko Kawaguchi. My dear dad did not quite live to hold a final copy of the book, but he is surely held in its pages.

Zurich, April 2023