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Through its focus on transplantation, this special issue of Historische Anthropologie proposes a new analytical language for describing the history of the modern world, one that aims to sharpen historians' understanding of global "connections". We do so by examining the global production of the key commodity of sugar in the period from the 1880s to the 1930s. Our focus is on Japan, which might seem to be a somewhat unusual starting point for a history of sugar production. But as our essays show, the first state-sanctioned mass migration programme of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) was designed with sugar plantation labour in mind; and overseas Japanese migration in the period in question was in many ways defined by labour opportunities in the cane fields of the western and central Pacific region. In tracing these migrations from the Japanese archipelago to Hawai'i, Taiwan and Saipan in particular, we therefore also traverse the formal borders of the expanding Japanese empire during this period. In this way, we join new work in challenging the historiographical frameworks by which Japanese imperial practice in the Asia-Pacific region has traditionally been studied.
The sugar plantation, we argue, constitutes both an empirically manageable site and a rich metaphor for our interest in the migrations of people, knowledge, capital and technology. Through focusing on successful and unsuccessful examples of transplantation between plantations and small farms across the western Pacific region, we aim to bring greater analytical precision to questions of connection and disconnection in global history, and to offer a framework which might be of use to scholars beyond our own areas of expertise.
Our special issue features cutting-edge work from the field of modern Japanese and global history, with essays by Akiko Mori and Miki Tsubota-Nakanishi (both in English translation from the original Japanese), and by Mariko Iijima and Martin Dusinberre. An initial "Editorial" by Dusinberre and Iijima sketches the wider theoretical contributions of our essays. The special issue is fully open access and the essays can be downloaded here.
