I am a historian of science and empire, currently completing a PhD in History at the University of Zurich. My research examines how agricultural knowledge became a tool of statecraft, colonial governance, and social reform in the modern world, with a particular focus on Japan, Hokkaido, and Taiwan.

My dissertation, “A Confucian Science,” studies the making of modern agricultural science across Japan’s imperial and postimperial worlds. It asks how older traditions of agrarian rule, moral economy, and Confucian political thought were refashioned through modern institutions: schools, experiment stations, colonial bureaucracies, technical training programs, settler communities, and development projects.

Rather than treating agricultural science as the arrival of a new body of knowledge into Japan, I study it as a process through which older ideas about government, livelihood, rural order, and social improvement were given new institutional and epistemic forms. Agricultural science became a way of classifying land, disciplining labor, organizing rural society, defining expert authority, and imagining the relationship between state, colony, and population.

My route into the history of science grew out of earlier work on cultural representation, urban space, museums, and historical consciousness in modern Japan. Across these projects, I became interested in how modern societies make the world legible through institutions, categories, and authoritative forms of knowledge. My doctoral research extends this concern from cultural representation to scientific and administrative knowledge, asking how agricultural expertise became a tool of empire, colonial governance, and social reform.

You can find my CV, publications, and a fuller description of my research project on this site. I can be reached at scott.ma[at]uzh.ch.

The image to the right is a depiction of farmer-soldiers created by bureaucrats at the Hokkaido Kaitakushi in early Meiji Japan, held at the Hokkaido Museum.