Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s SS Great Britain was a world first when she was launched at Bristol in 1843. This uniquely successful passenger ship design brought together the leading technologies of the day (screw propeller, iron hull and 1,000hp steam engine) to transform world travel. She was a successful ship and continued sailing until 1886, travelling 32 times around the world and nearly one million miles at sea. Great Britain was finally abandoned in the Falkland Islands in 1937, but in 1970 an ambitious salvage effort brought her home to Bristol, where today she is conserved.

Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. This compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access.