In 1691, Satsuma officials brought sugarcane from Ryukyu to the Amami Islands, which the domain called Michi-no-shima, the “Pathway Islands.” This began a plantation economy of cleared forests, stripped reefs, and debt servitude whose black sugar would become a pillar of the domain's finances. A century later, cane and techniques that had slipped out of Satsuma's control seeded a very different industry in the villages of Shikoku, where domains promoted refined white sugar. Setting these two sugar histories within the global history of sugar, alongside those of southern China, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, this talk asks why one crop produced such different systems in two corners of the archipelago and what that reveals about the place of Ryukyu and Japan in the early modern world.

Thomas Monaghan is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies and a historian of early modern and modern Japan whose research connects Japan's southern border islands to the global history of sugar, empire, and the environment. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2025 and is completing a book on the Satsuma domain's sugar colonies in the Amami Islands.

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