Crossing the North Atlantic was one of the world's most important oceanic voyages by the eighteenth century. By then, ships built and owned in the British North American colonies and, late in the period, the United States were crossing this dangerous and often-fickle ocean in large numbers. The surviving logbooks of such vessels can serve as unique source material for understanding the Atlantic experience for scholars prepared to interpret and exploit them. Recording the Atlantic passages of the small schooner Sultana, the snow George, and the brig Reward in the Global Sea Routes (GSR) database creates a record for future researchers with a broad array of interests, but only after the obstacles to interpretation are overcome, to the extent possible. I will discuss what those obstacles are, laying out the information to be found in these logs, how it is entered and why, and what it has to tell us about the Atlantic and those who used it at the time. I will make the case that what is contained in these sources justifies the acquisition of the technical and historical expertise necessary to use them.

Note: the snow rig was popular among mid-size ocean-going Atlantic merchant ships by the mid-eighteenth century. It is similar to the two-masted brig, as opposed to the three-masted ship, but it has a small “try-mast” just behind the main mast (the after mast), on which the mizzen sail was hoisted.

This afterword provides a critical examination of the historical connections between tourism and empire. To contextualise this discussion, a concise overview is provided of the history of tourism, its entanglements with empire and expansion into a truly global industry in the modern era. This is followed by an analysis that draws on the articles making up this special issue in order to highlight their contributions and connections to the most recent wider literature and in particular the significant themes raised that have thus far been underrepresented in the nascent historiography on tourism and empire. The afterword finishes by providing a strong argument for the necessity of continuing this line of investigation further, with a particular emphasis on the need to understand the double role of tourism as both an instrument of imperial oppression, as well as a site of localised forms of agency and contestation.

Over the past two decades, the relatively young field of global history has generated remarkable excitement among students, scholars, and readers who want to read scholarship that crosses borders and brings many worlds to a single methodological framework. Global perspectives have been particularly fruitful for telling political histories that have defined the modern world. Today, there is increasing scholarly interest in writing global intellectual histories of decolonisation and anti-colonialism. In the pages that follow, I consider new work, situated in several disciplines, that pushes the methodological boundaries of historical inquiry into our connected pasts. These works include Daniel Elam's World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth; Madhumita Lahiri's Imperfect Solidarities; Peace on Our Terms by Mona L. Siegel; and The Fury Archives by Juno Jill Richards.

Islands have played a much larger role in global history than their small size may suggest. The study of islands, once a part of maritime history, has since 2006 grown into its own interdisciplinary field of “island studies.” The three books analysed in this review all stand to contribute to the new field. The books under review are The Boundless Sea (2019), A World at Sea (2020), and África y sus islas (2021). Island-specific topics advanced by these books include islands as nodes in trade networks, the detrimental influence of colonisation on island environments, the use of islands as locations to escape from slavery, ethnographic descriptions of islands, and indigenous knowledge produced by islanders.

The 1850s and 1860s were a crucial era in the history of East Asia. The opening of treaty ports and advances in information and navigational technologies both generated new commercial opportunities and brought more people and commodities from Europe and America to East Asia. What were the consequences of these political and socioeconomic changes and the resultant spatial interconnections? I argue that spatial interconnections rendered centuries-old nonstate spaces in East Asia increasingly problematic, to the extent of creating international conflicts. To illustrate this, I reconstruct the mutual influence among places constructed by and shown in the lives of the shipwrecked American vessel Rover and its crew in East Asian waters. Their activities embodied how transpacific and East Asian communication and commerce, and the growing treaty port community in China, became entangled with how Taiwanese aborigines managed their interaction with the outside world. In this and similar borderland incidents, spatial interconnections between central and peripheral East Asia constructed by ordinary people crossing borders, and the problems arising from such interactions, led to the problematization of peripheries in the 1860s.