Miki Sugiura
Miki Sugiura is Professor of Global Economic History at Hosei University, Japan. Her research focuses on the history of global trade, with particular attention to export promotion for consumer goods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across East Asia, north-western Europe, and South and East Africa. She has published widely on the global circulation of textiles, crafts, and beverages. Her peer-reviewed articles—both single- and co-authored—have appeared in leading international journals such as Business History, Transport History, and Textile History. She has also contributed to edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan.
As regards to the other speakers of the panel, first, Robert Fletcher is Professor of History and Kinder Professor of British History at University of Missouri. A historian of the global dimensions of the British Empire, he has published extensively, including more than seven peer-reviewed articles since 2018, several monographs, and multiple co-edited essay collections. His scholarship has been recognised with major research funding, most notably a Leadership Fellowship from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2015–19). In 2022, he received the University of Missouri’s Derrick-Patman Award for Faculty Excellence.
Second, Hideaki Suzuki is Associate Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology and a leading figure in East African and western Indian Ocean studies. His work spans the abolition of slavery, the trade ecology of the Indian Ocean World, and the cultural history of consumers in East Africa. He has authored numerous articles, monographs, and edited volumes that have shaped the field and advanced interdisciplinary research on Africa’s entanglements with global economic and cultural currents.
Hosei University
Session
During the interwar years, British East Africa and Japan became linked through a set of commercial, informational, and cultural entanglements that unfolded with remarkable speed. Within a decade, Japanese trading companies opened direct shipping lines to Mombasa, entered regional distribution networks, and transformed everyday material life: East Africans adopted Japanese shoes, clothing, enamelware, and other household goods. By the early 1930s, Japanese manufacturers were displacing British products across the region, unsettling established commercial hierarchies and prompting British officials to reassess the security of imperial markets.
Scholarship has largely approached this encounter through British archives, which portray Japan as a threatening intruder into “protected” imperial space. Yet Japanese sources—trade journals, consular reports, industrial surveys, and exporters’ writings—reveal a far more complex set of relationships. They illuminate how Japanese actors interpreted African societies, evaluated British colonial rule, and positioned themselves within a global order characterized by shifting imperial rivalries and intensifying South–South connections.
This panel asks how Japan’s presence reshaped British East Africa—and, equally, how East Africa reshaped Japanese understandings of empire, markets, and civilizational hierarchy. Taking Japan not simply as a competitor but as a trans-imperial actor operating within the British imperial economy while remaining outside its governing structures, the panel interrogates the multiple roles Japan occupied: competitor, collaborator, interpreter, and catalyst. Collectively, the papers argue that Japanese activities exposed vulnerabilities within the British Empire, generated new forms of knowledge about African markets, and opened spaces for East African consumer agency.
By foregrounding the reciprocal production of information, the civilizing discourses embedded in manufactured goods, and the co-creation of new material cultures, the panel contributes to emerging debates in world and imperial history on trans-imperialism, global commodity circuits, and the role of non-Western empires in shaping African colonial economies.