This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.

The 1866 banking crisis effectively ended London’s iron shipbuilding industry. Few companies survived, so destitution faced many shipyard workers. Processing industries also changed. Beet sugar replaced cane, soft sugar hard ‘baked’ sugar and production became concentrated in two firms. In contrast, boosted by foreign grain imports, London’s milling industry expanded. South bank maritime communities maintained established industrial patterns. Shipbuilding proved resilient and traditional employment systems persisted in the Rotherhithe docks, but settlements of waterfront wharf labourers, many of Irish origin, were desperately poor. Poverty was also a hallmark of the north bank. Less socially mixed than in the past, mythic undifferentiated images of ‘Outcast London’ obscured the East End’s continuing maritime connections, including the presence of skilled workers and their organisations. Sailors ashore, the subject of State intervention, were an exception.

After a few years of competition following the end of monopolies and exacerbated by the new St. Katharine’s Dock Company, rivalry was muted by rate agreements and the amalgamation of the East and West India Companies. However, except in the Baltic trade south bank docks, regional cargo specialisation to a large extent came to an end. All north bank companies had a core of permanent employees, but most were casually employed. Company records reveal how managers organised, motivated and disciplined their labouring workforce and also how those men with particular skills resisted such control. Relations with the Customs could also be difficult. In 1848, both the London and St. Katharine’s companies were raided, accused of defrauding the revenue by passing off sugar as waste. After a very public row, significant reputational damage to the companies and the intervention of a parliamentary committee, a compromise was reached.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) exists as a lonely island in a sea of corporate sugarcane. Standing at the gates of CIAT outside Palmira, Colombia, one absorbs the contrast between the research orientation of the CGIAR’s global food system model and the reality of corporate monoculture. This chapter situates CIAT’s history globally and locally. It introduces Colombian precursors, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Colombian Agricultural Program (1950–64), and the pivot to globally oriented international agricultural research centres in the 1960s. It contextualizes how CIAT came into existence amid broader Cold War and Green Revolution transitions. Just as scholars of the Colombian conflict have examined the effect of “deterritorialization” in the intensification of conflict, the chapter shows how the CGIAR network further internationalized and detached agricultural science from local contexts and applications. Paradoxically, despite the Green Revolution’s well-known Cold War geopolitical aspects, the creation of CIAT and CGIAR inadvertently contributed to the specific geographic, political, and economic conditions that fed armed conflict in Colombia.

We all have to eat, and what we eat has been established by numerous cultural forces. When we begin to view food as fuel for our brain, we may have to confront our dietary eating patterns in order to enhance brain health and mental strength. The consumption of hyperpalatable foods, often ultra-processed with excess sugar and fat, can lead to self-medication with food and to compromised brain health. The motivation and reward system in our brain that facilitates our habits includes the overconsumption of unhealthy food. This chapter covers the critical neurodestructive conditions that are impacted by our diet (dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, inflammation, oxidation, elevated blood sugar, malfunctioning gut microbiome); argues that ultra-processed foods and comfort foods with high concentrations of sugar and fat are bad for the brain, highly addictive, and targets for self-medication; and concludes with foods to avoid and foods to consume to optimize brain health and mental strength.

Less than a decade after the American Civil War, the United States signed the 1874 reciprocity treaty, imposing its first restrictions on Hawaiian sovereignty. Whereas most scholars take for granted US interests in controlling Hawaii, we ask how this interest emerged in 1874. We argue the answer lies with American entrepreneurs like Henry A.P. Carter. The rise of commodity prices - first in sandalwood, then in whale oil, and finally, in sugar - drove American entrepreneurs to Hawaii. When threats to their enterprises emerged, they formed a lobby to advocate for American imperialism, and shaped perceptions of the costs and benefits of imperialism within Hawaii and the United States.

Long arrived in Jamaica in 1758 hoping to make money and to be able to return to England soon. The plantation would be the source of his wealth, and a settlement with his older brother Robert secured him in the ownership of Lucky Valley. Having speedily made a propitious marriage into the white elite, he devoted himself for the next eleven years to every aspect of the management of a sugar plantation, all of which he subsequently described in his History. He represents the planter’s life as one of constant work and anxiety, yet ‘smoothed by the allurements of profit’. He saw himself as the head of the enterprise, responsible at every level, and disavowed the skills of the enslaved. He acquired new enslaved labour, organized the plantation on the basis of gendered and racialized practices, bought new land and built new works, greatly increasing the production of sugar and rum. Foreseeing the likelihood of an end to the slave trade, he worried about the failure of enslaved women to reproduce themselves, which he blamed on them, thus threatening future prosperity. He proposed new practices to improve what was conceptualized as ‘breeding’.

“Look, if it’s not my genes, it must be the environment?” I overheard someone say this in a pub. Well, yes and no. One of the visible aspects of urban environments – and let’s face it, most of us are urban now – is food. Ever-present junk food, aisles of frozen pizza and snack foods in the supermarkets. In the United Kingdom, which built much of its colonial power on the triangle of relationships among industrialization, slavery and plantation production, sugar is historically a huge industry, and you can see sugar-based products in stores everywhere. It hurts people’s lives through dental decay, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. In the United States, perfectly edible maize is systematically turned into high-fructose corn syrup, a substance that is even more damaging to health than sugar.

The growth of the sugar plantation and gold and diamond mining economies and the growth of the port cities

This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.

This chapter focuses on the archival challenge of how to frame the time and space of transit – in this case, the two-week journey from Yokohama to Honolulu as Japanese migrant labourers began their new lives in mid 1885. Considering transit as a fundamental ‘in-between’ space in global history, the chapter takes as its empirical starting point a large oil painting by the American painter Joseph Dwight Strong (1853–99). Strong’s painting purports to depict a Japanese family on the Spreckelsville plantation in Maui – the plantation on which the labourer whose gravestone is discussed in Chapter 1 once worked. To contextualize the transit features of Strong’s work, the chapter discusses the wider dynamics of post-1868 economic disruption in Japan on the one hand and, on the other, the post-US Civil War expansion of the sugar industry in the Hawaiian Kingdom. In this way, the chapter unpacks the painting’s wider claims about Japan and Hawai‘i’s respective positions in the changing Pacific world, including a fundamental fiction at the image’s core. It thereby makes the case both for Native Hawaiian voices and for Japanese migrant-labourer voices to be brought to global history’s archival foreground.

During the 1760s, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue created a lively public forum to address colonial agricultural concerns that metropolitan learned societies largely ignored. Colonists enthusiastically embraced the same rhetoric of emulation and civic-mindedness as their counterparts in France while vigorously asserting intellectual authority based in practice. They sought to improve the cultivation of older but challenging crops, such as indigo and cotton, and to introduce new crops that would enhance the colony’s profitability, provide gainful employment for their society’s poorer members, and occupy unexploited ecological niches. To assess proposed innovations, they staged trials witnessed by expert practitioners; circulated information through manuscripts; and wrote up public answers to questions posed by the Affiches. This chapter also shows the limitations of local improvisations to solve agricultural problems as competing claims to intellectual authority based in experience created rifts between groups of colonists, colonists and the editors of their periodicals, and colonists and elite metropolitan institutions.

The tenth to thirteenth centuries were formative in the creation of what we now know as Chinese cuisine, including its rich regional diversity. The foods that people in the Song, Liao, and Jin ate were dependent on what the natural environment provided or what could be acquired through trade. But food and drink were also products of cultural preferences that evolved over time and came to identify economic, social, and ethnic difference. Song, Khitan, and Jurchen foodways differed significantly, rooted in the experiences of steppe and agrarian life as well as the diversity of cultures. People encountered unfamiliar food and drink in the cities andthrough diplomatic and commercial exchanges between Song and its neighbors. The food and drink people consumed were also deeply tied to the theory and practice of Chinese medicine, which reached new levels of standardization and sophistication during the Song and Jin. How were medical traditions transmitted through texts and teachers? How did the state promote and regulate medical knowledge and practice? The spread of printing and commercial publishing made information about food and medicine more widely available to the literate, and others could gain access to this knowledge through oral and visual transmission.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the Hawaiian archipelago, c.1898–1911, newly annexed to the US as part of the sudden irruption of American empire in the Pacific. American ornithologists and naval officers discovered that Japanese bird-hunters were regularly operating on otherwise uninhabited atolls in the outlying Northwest Hawaiian group. Inspired by a mixture of concern for animal welfare, geopolitics (the islands were potentially valuable as cable-landing stations) and ambient racial anxiety about Japanese immigration, US colonial administrators deployed nature conservation as a means of asserting sovereignty over uninhabited space. Key to this process was the scientist William Alanson Bryan, who had witnessed the Marcus Island Incident at first hand and was determined to protect both American birds and territory from Japan’s advance into the Pacific. To this end, he successfully lobbied Theodore Roosevelt to establish the Hawaiian Islands Reservation, forerunner of today’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.