This chapter outlines how from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century a mature Tokugawa shogunate recast the Japanese realm’s structures of trade, diplomacy, and maritime defense. It details the ways in which the Tokugawa regime, despite being Japan’s central authority, could not act unilaterally but had to recognize the agency held by the Satsuma and Tsushima domains in their relations with foreign states. In addition, the chapter explains the monopolistic and market tools employed by the shogunate to control key sectors of Japan’s foreign trade. It also explores the broader Pacific contexts – notably a common desire among participants to limit the use of silver in trade with China – that shaped the Japanese state’s foreign trade. Finally, it details the diversity in imported products that emerged by the early nineteenth century, reflected in the variety of goods in demand by both male and female Japanese consumers.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter examines the life of Imai Nobuo, a Tokugawa retainer, to highlight first the level of violence that marked the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration, and second, the motivations and experiences of armed groups, such as one led by Imai, that fought against the Chōshū-Satsuma alliance throughout the Boshin War. The chapter also reveals how following the war’s end, financial support from local and regional entities helped Imai and other Tokugawa “losers” start new lives in Shizuoka prefecture, in Imai’s case initially as a prefectural bureaucrat and later as a tea farmer. Imai’s life thus underscores how personal reinvention in Meiji Japan was made possible by the forgiving stance of regional and central government leaders. Exemplifying the global connections at the heart of this volume, the chapter additionally charts the ways in which US demand for green tea, which expanded in the 1870s, helped to make tea farming a viable profession for Imai and other ex-Tokugawa stalwarts. Overall through the life of Imai, it pinpoints some of the internal and global factors that helped facilitate reconciliation and by implication, nation-state formation in the early Meiji Japan.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s main arguments as well as summaries of its chapters. It begins with an accounting of recent historiographical trends, primarily in the West but also in Japan, concerning the Meiji Restoration and the creation of the Japanese nation-state. It follows with a brief discussion of the development of the fields of global and world history in the West and Japan. It then details the thematic threads - economic trends, internal conflicts that raged throughout the 1860s, and post-Restoration reconciliation/resolution - that run through the volume, highlighting the ways in which the book shows the immediate and contextual intersections of each with the nineteenth-century world. In its concluding pages, the chapter presents how the book’s three sections - global connections, internal conflicts, and domestic resolutions - are formulated, pointing out ways in which the chapters connect across the span of the volume.