The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation. Edited by Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. x, 284 pp. ISBN: 9781108478052 (cloth)

Consciously seeking to reorient the established categories that dominate discussions of revolution and modern state formation, the book is divided into three sections that examine trends experienced by many countries across the nineteenth century: entanglement in the global economy, armed conflicts driven by challenges to the status quo, and the construction of a new national narrative postconflict. The first two essays hinge on 1866 as an underappreciated point of conjuncture, with Mark Metzler connecting local unrest and political instability in Japan to the global commodities market, and Noell H. Wilson demonstrating how the global demand for whale oil led to a Tariff Convention that permitted Japanese sailors to work on American whaling ships. [...]Takagi Hiroshi clarifies how Nara and Kyoto were made into “ancient capitals” on par with Rome in order to bolster Japan's image as a civilized nation in the eyes of the international community.