In a decade since I first began work on this project, I have accumulated a number of scholarly and personal debts that I can never hope to repay. My career as a Japanese historian began, quite unexpectedly, when after completing my first degree in South Africa, I was awarded a Monbukagakushō scholarship to study in Japan. As the program had only just extended to South Africa, which had as yet no Japanese language programs, I traveled to Niigata University, my designated host institution, knowing no Japanese and without the slightest background in East Asian history. For these reasons, I am enormously grateful to all my teachers at Niigata University who enabled me first to find my footing and later to complete my master’s degree. My thanks go especially to Yoshii Kenichi, who agreed to take on such a plainly underqualified student, and to Igor Saveliev, who was a constant source of support and encouragement, but also to Imura Tetsuo, Itō Rei, the inimitable Nakamura-sensei, Furamaya Tadao, and many others that I cannot name here.
This project first took tentative form during my doctoral studies at Columbia University, where I owe special thanks to my adviser, David Lurie, who took on a project very distant from his own work, but proved in every way the ideal academic mentor and who remains to this day my model for how to treat students. Carol Gluck, whose intellectual energy and organizational drive has been so central to the success of Columbia’s Japanese history program, was equally supportive and I benefited as well from numerous discussions with Henry Smith, Greg Pflugfelder, and other Columbia faculty. Bob McCaughey sparked my interest in maritime history and, to my great benefit, drew first my research and later my teaching slowly out to sea. Lauren Benton, who generously agreed to serve on my dissertation committee, challenged me to think in new ways about legal history and her work and insights have shaped my research. I shared my time first at Columbia and later in Japan, with a group of scholars and friends who made the long hours of research and training an unexpected pleasure. Although I cannot name them all, I am especially grateful to Colin Jaundrill, Chelsea Foxwell, Reto Hofmann, Federico Marcon, Mathew Thompson, Ariel Fox, Steve Wills, Dennis Frost, Joy Kim, and Chad Diehl for their friendship and company.
Much of the research for this project was conducted at the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo, to which I have returned on regular occasions. The field of Japanese-Dutch relations (nichiran kankei) relies on the tireless work of Matsui Yōko, Matsukata Fuyuko, and the staff of the Overseas Material Sections, who have taken on the onerous task of editing the diaries of the Dutch opperhoofden in Japan, and my research would not have been possible without everything they have done. They have also made each of my stays at the institute a pleasure and have generously made time to offer advice on a host of issues. It was my great privilege to work closely with Professor Matsukata on the translation of part of her pioneering monograph, and I learned more from this than I can say. At Tokyo University, Oka Mihoko, Yukitake Kazuhiro, Katō Eiichi, Haneda Masashi, Gonoi Takashi, Yamamoto Hirofumi, and the staff of the institute’s library all helped me in a range of different ways while Ohashi Akiko, as she has done for so many visiting fellows, turned our shared office into far more than just a space for research. Nagazumi Yōko, the great historian of the Dutch in Japan, graciously agreed to meet with me and offered a range of insights into my work. I am also grateful to Igawa Kenji, who has helped me navigate the difficult terrain of seventeenth-century sources, and to Gotō Atsushi for his tireless assistance in fielding a seemingly endless sequence of translation-related queries.
My research was made possible by a Japan Foundation doctoral fellowship, which enabled me to spend a year in Japan. After I returned to the United States, the American Council of Learned Societies provided me with crucial writing time via a dissertation completion fellowship and subsequently an early career fellowship. A second fellowship from the Japan Foundation enabled me to return to Japan for three months in late 2009 to collect the last remaining sources for this project.
Over the years, I have made numerous visits to the Netherlands, where I received guidance and support from Cynthia Viallé, Willem Boot, Atsushi Ota, Femme Gaastra, and others. Special mention must be made of Leonard Blussé, the towering figure in my field, whose intellectual contribution and unrivaled production of source materials has transformed the way all of us do research. In all of our meetings, whether in Japan, the Netherlands, or the United States, he has pushed me to rethink my ideas while always inspiring me to go back to the archives with renewed enthusiasm. Although I was never part of the TANAP program, I have benefitted greatly from its reinvigoration of the field and from the steady stream of excellent monographs that it has produced. In the Netherlands my particular thanks must go to Nadia Kreeft, who visited the National Archives in The Hague numerous times on my behalf to scan and copy long lists of materials for this project, while also offering invaluable aid whenever I became stuck with a translation.
Monash University, which I joined in 2008, has provided an enormously collegial and highly supportive environment within which to complete research. All four of my heads of department, Barbara Caine, Mark Peel, Christina Twomey, and Al Thomson, generously allowed me time off teaching for research and writing while a very welcome sabbatical, coupled with generous research funding, in the second half of 2012 enabled the completion of this book. Bain Attwood worked tirelessly not only to safeguard my research time but also that of all junior scholars in the department. He took the time to read and offer tremendously valuable comments on the full draft of my manuscript as well. I thank all of my colleagues, many of whom have read chapters or listened to presentations related to this book, for their ongoing support, but especially Ernest Koh, Seamus O’Hanlon, Michael Hau, David Garrioch, Jane Drakard, Clare Monagle, and Susie Protschky. David Chandler, one of the preeminent historians of Southeast Asia, read the full manuscript and improved it greatly with his suggestions.
During my many years of research, I have discussed this work with a range of scholars who have all contributed valuable suggestions. These include Peter Shapinsky, who offered astute comments on my chapters on VOC privateering, Reinier Hesselink, Peter Borschberg, Martine van Ittersum, Ron Toby, Patrizia Carioti, Timon Screech, Stephen Turnbull, Kate Nakai, Robert Hellyer, Daphon Ho, Arano Yasunori and others. Jack Wills, who pioneered the study of VOC diplomacy, read drafts of some of my chapters and was always willing to share his encyclopedic knowledge of European expansion into Asia. I left each of our meetings with fresh insights and a long list of new sources to consider. The editors of Japanese Studies, the Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies, and Itinerario generously gave permission for those sections of this work that had previously been published in these journals to be included here.
I am especially grateful to Adam McKeown who steered this project through from rough idea to final publication. I first met Adam while I will still living in Japan in 2001 and was delighted to find he had subsequently moved to Columbia. I owe my interest in global history to him and my work has been shaped in more ways than I can list by his suggestions and insights. He encouraged me to think about placing this book in a global history series and shepherded it through the various stages. I also thank Anna Routon, my indefatigable editor at the press, Whitney Johnson and the two readers, who offered both astute comments and valuable correctives. Tonio Andrade, who waived his anonymity, produced page after page of helpful suggestions that greatly strengthened the final manuscript. As should be clear from the numerous references scattered throughout this study, his scholarship and especially his two superb books, on the company’s colonization of Taiwan, and more recently on the military campaign that ended the Dutch presence on that island, have greatly influenced my own work while providing a template for the sort of history, engaging, provocative, but always grounded in meticulous research, that I aspire (if never with his measure of success) to write.
My wife Anna has lived with this project for year after year and has supported it in countless ways. My greatest thanks go to my parents, whose love, support, and encouragement have always sustained me. They endured as I, the youngest of their three sons, disappeared off to Japan, the United States, and then Australia for years on end, and have shown a remarkable willingness to hop on planes headed for the far-flung places that the life of an academic has taken me. This book would not have been possible without everything they had done for me, and I dedicate it to them.