Globality Without Mobility: Ephemera, 1830s–1860s

Abstract: Histories of the nineteenth-century world often emphasize movements, connections, and linear paths toward uniformity. It is, however, possible to tell a global history of the nineteenth century that features sessile, globally disconnected actors; scarcely valuable commodities; and convergences that ended. Such is the case with the commercial publishers of late-Tokugawa Japan and the disaster lists they designed before the “opening” of the country in 1868. Disaster lists responded to seismic shifts that were both local and global: the rise of a market for organized knowledge and the formation of new ways of seeing. Their blend of survey and spectacle links Japanese printers to publishers in Europe, North America, and Mexico. Wholly unrestricted by the imperatives of movement and connectivity, disaster lists still trace the contours of a world in transformation. They also heed the call to look at globalization from the bottom up and from non-Eurocentric, non-West-centric, non-macro perspectives.