Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University and has published widely on topics related to Japanese foreign relations and trade as well as Pacific history. His publications include Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (2010). Harald Fuess is Professor of History at the Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, and Project Professor at Kyoto University. He also served as elected President of the European Association of Japanese Studies. His publications include Japanese Imperialism and Its Postwar Legacy (1998) and Divorce in Japan: Gender, Family, and the State (2004).

• Introduction Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess; Part I. Global Connections: 1. Japan and the world conjuncture of 1866 Mark Metzler; 2. Western whalers in 1860s Hakodate: how the Nantucket of the North Pacific connected Restoration-era Japan to global flows Noell H. Wilson; 3. Small town, big dreams: a Yokohama merchant and the transformation of Japan Simon Partner; 4. The global weapons trade and the Meiji Restoration: dispersion of means of violence in a world of emerging nation-states Harald Fuess; Part II. Internal Conflicts: 5. Mountain demons from Mito – the arrival of civil war in Echizen in 1864 Maren Ehlers; 6. 'Farmer-soldiers' and local leadership in late Edo period Japan Brian Platt; 7. A military history of the Boshin War Hōya Tōru; 8. Imai Nobuo: a Tokugawa stalwart's path from the Boshin War to personal reinvention in the Meiji nation-state Robert Hellyer; Part III. Domestic Resolutions: 9. Settling the frontier and defending the North: the 'farmer-soldiers' in Hokkaido's colonial development and national reconciliation Steven Ivings; 10. Locally ancient and globally modern: Restoration discourse and the tensions of modernity Mark Ravina; 11. Ornamental diplomacy: Emperor Meiji and the monarchs of the modern world John Breen; 12. The restoration of the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto and international cultural legitimacy in Meiji Japan Takagi Hiroshi.

'A timely intervention: this book portrays the Meiji Restoration as being at the crossroads of international trade and the world economy, and as part of the violent 1860s that remade the world. As a result, we are beginning to understand the Restoration on a truly global stage.' Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin