Tracing the history of Japanese agricultural science

from late eighteenth century debates on the annexation of Hokkaido to the colonization of Taiwan, and from the fin-de-siècle development of Colonial Policy Studies to its intellectual legacies in the logic of postwar Japanese foreign aid, my dissertation examines agricultural science in modern Japan as it was governed by the state, taught by academics, practiced by technocrats, and experienced by settlers. It draws on the archives of colonial bureaucracies and universities in Hokkaido and Taiwan; scientific publications and political debates across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and classical Chinese Legalist and Confucian texts on the arts of government. It furthermore shows how these traditional forms of political thought were reconciled with the introduction of Western agricultural science from the United States and Germany through multilingual, transnational comparison. In doing so, the dissertation identifies how premodern and pan-Asian ideologies continue to subtend the logic of East Asian science today.