Peter Ennals is the author of Opening a Window to the West. The first book-length study of Kōbe’s Foreign Concession, Opening a Window to the West situates Kōbe within the larger pattern of globalization occurring throughout East Asia in the nineteenth century.
How did you become involved in your area of research?
I was fortunate to be appointed Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Kwansei Gakuin University near Kobe in 1986-7. I had no previous relationship with Japan and assumed that this would be a singular visit. Few can spend a year in Japan without being profoundly affected and this was certainly my reaction.
What inspired you to write this book? How did you become interested in the subject?
Upon returning from Japan to Mount Allison University I picked up my usual set of courses one of which was a senior seminar in Historical Geography that aimed to offer students a genuine archival research experience. Whenever possible I steered the course toward the rich primary sources of the University Archives. In this instance we focused on private papers which consisted of the personal and business papers of a local master mariner Thomas Reese Anderson. Anderson’s papers contained log books and correspondence pertaining to this many voyages spanning the period between about 1856 and 1892. As a seminar we agreed that each student would select a voyage and reconstruct its commercial objectives, as well as the details of the cultural and geographical encounter that flowed from it. Finding myself unencumbered by administrative duties (a not insignificant bonus of having been away for a year) I opted to research and write a paper along with the students. My initial survey of documents revealed that Captain Anderson’s final voyage in 1892 required him take a cargo consisting primarily of jars of “case oil” (kerosene) from New York City to Yokohama, Japan. After discharging this cargo there he made his way to the port of Kobe to refit his ship and collect a return cargo. This latter episode placed him in the Port of Kobe for several weeks during which his diary detailed his life and impressions ashore. As I executed my seminar paper, I became fascinated with Kobe’s Foreign Concession, an enclave of Euro-American settlement that served to segregate and house foreign mercantile firms and personnel beginning in 1868. It quickly became clear to me that this sub-settlement, which mirrored other similarly configured “treaty ports” in Japan and on the China coast was deserving of further investigation. A successful grant application to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada enabled me to return to Japan in 1991 where I again linked up with Kwansei Gakuin University as a Visiting Fellow and carried out research in the Kobe City Archives.
How long did it take you to write your latest book?
The execution of a first draft of this book took an unusual length of time to execute primarily because I was serving first as an academic Dean, during which I retained my full teaching load, followed by a four year period during which I served as Vice President Academic and Research. These duties meant that personal research and writing necessarily proceeded in fits and starts. Retirement allowed me to finally bring the project to fruition. What began as a chance encounter with Japan in 1986-7 finally reached fruition in 2013- journey lasting 26 years.
Did you have to travel much concerning the research/writing of your book?
Research for this book involved a remarkable amount of travel. Because the “actors” who made up the mercantile community of Kobe between 1868 and 1899 were drawn from the broader European and American world, their archival traces were scattered widely. In addition to research conducted in archives in Kobe and Yokohama, my research project took me to the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass., Harvard’s Baker Library in Cambridge Mass, the Library of Congress and National Archives in Washington. I also visited the Cambridge University Library, the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the (British) National Archives at Kew in London. Finally, I also spent a period at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.
What was the hardest part of writing your book?
One of the challenges of this project was the need to transform my research training and orientation from the study of rural settlement and cultural landscape formation in Eastern North America during the 19th-century, to an understanding of Euro- American mercantile trade patterns particularly those playing out in East Asia in the 19th-century. Even more daunting was the challenge of probing the profound changes occurring in Japan as the Tokugawa Regime gave way the Meiji Era. Cross-cultural research is difficult in any circumstance, but it is more so when the language barrier is as challenging as it is in the case of Japanese. Inevitably this book frames the Japanese encounter with Western traders through the lens of the foreigners.
What are your current/future projects?
It is clear that I have an appetite to embrace research projects that force me to grapple with quite different settings and actors. My current project explores the arrival and subsequent activities of a family of tobacco planters on the Eastern Shore of Maryland after 1660. This project has required that I learn about the systems of settlement in colonial Virginia and Maryland and the organization of the tobacco production system and it role in forging a trading system. Inevitably the success and wealth generation in this economy derived from the labour of African slaves. Seeing this economy and society through the lens of one family encourages a highly focused picture. The fact that this family’s name was Ennalls, makes this project more haunting even if this family is not directly related to me.
