In his new book, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories (Cambridge, 2023), Martin Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. He does so by reconstructing the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia in the late-nineteenth century. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre asks, where are the global archive’s sites—and who are “we” as we cite it?