Chapter 2 offers a case study centered on the island of Hachijō, where life with the current gave rise to unique economic practices and social organization. It centers on the seasonal rhythm of castaway arrivals and repatriation that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had become an important branch of the local economy. Numbers of castaways were significant because sailors used winds and the eastward current to propel their voyage, even though their crafts were unfit for offshore sailing. In the peak year of 1850 alone, 300 sailors arrived on twenty-seven vessels from western Japan. Historical arrivals of foreign castaways and flotsam have created a virtual geography and local identity that connected the remote island to India, whence the “river” Kuroshio was believed to flow, and China, whence the current was believed to have brought important cultural achievements.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.