Agricultural Science and Imperial Statecraft in Modern East Asia: A Confucian Science
My dissertation examines agricultural science as a form of imperial statecraft. It follows the institutions, experts, and political languages through which agricultural knowledge was used to govern rural society, organize colonial settlement, and imagine the future of the modern state.
The project centers on Japan and its imperial borderlands, especially Hokkaido and Taiwan, but its questions are broader. How did agricultural science become a language of modern government? How were older forms of Confucian agrarian thought reworked within modern scientific institutions? And how did ideas of improvement, productivity, civilization, and rural welfare move between domestic reform, settler colonialism, empire, and postwar development?
Drawing on colonial archives, university records, scientific publications, political debates, and premodern texts on agrarian rule, the dissertation argues that modern agricultural science in East Asia was not simply a Western import. It was produced through the interaction of transnational scientific models with older political traditions, imperial ambitions, and local colonial conditions.
The dissertation brings together four fields:
History of science
Empire, colonialism, and settler colonialism
Global intellectual history
Modern East Asian history