In The Narrowing Sea, Hannah Shepherd examines the shared histories of Pusan and Fukuoka over the eight decades from Japan's forced opening of Korea's ports in 1876 to the end of the Korean War in 1953. One city was Korean, the other Japanese; one was a burgeoning colonial port, the other a provincial city buoyed by imperial expansion. Wars, colonization, and capitalist industrialization forged intimate connections between the two, knitting together an imperial region that transcended its maritime boundaries. Drawing on both Japanese and Korean archives, and emphasizing the concept of imperial urbanization, Shepherd challenges traditional views of empire and urban growth and shows how local networks, migration, and capital flows shaped the region's exploitative and uneven geographies. The waters between Fukuoka and Pusan narrowed through intensified interactions that continued even after the end of empire, creating enduring legacies for the postwar and postcolonial eras.
Hannah Shepherd is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University.
"Moving beyond customary typologies of imperial or colonial cities, The Narrowing Sea offers a pioneering urban social history of imperialism's foot soldiers. The everyday lives of the inhabitants of Fukuoka and Pusan make for a more powerful understanding of Japan's early twentieth-century empire than the usual look at grand politics."—Michael Goebel, author of Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism
"Hannah Shepherd deftly elucidates the mutually informing dynamics of imperialism and capitalist urbanization that drew Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Tsushima Strait into a coherent yet stratified space, shaped and reshaped by the ambitions and networks of 'local' Japanese and Korean elites and lower-class migrants, and by evolving material technologies, geopolitical agendas, and the violent forms of extraction these demanded. As this innovative study shows, these processes continue to shape the postimperial and postcolonial present."—David Ambaras, author of Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire
"The Narrowing Sea is an ambitious history of global capitalism and planetary urbanization as captured in the colonial integration of two port cities—one Japanese, one Korean. Covering more than seven decades of history, Shepherd takes us on a back-and-forth adventure as she traces the colonial movements of the settlers and migrants, the ferries and planes, the goods and products that made two cities into a single region. Ambitious history at its best."—Andre Schmid, author of Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919
382 pp.6 x 9Illus: 19 b/w illustrations, 8 maps, 3 tables
9780520405288$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Dec 2025