ERC Consolidator Grant · 2025
Consuming Nature: Early Modernity, Popular Culture and the Natural World in Japan, 1600-1900
The central hypothesis of Consuming Nature is that a new mode of interacting with the natural world developed among non-elites during the social and economic upheavals of Japan’s Tokugawa period (1600–1868), with consequences for our understanding of “early modernity” in the Japanese case and beyond. Previous studies, both of Japan and of other regions, have examined early modern nature from the perspective of environmental degradation and resource management or elite philosophy and natural science. In contrast, the focus of this cultural historical study will be on a largely untapped corpus of objects and texts from 17th to 19th century Japan attesting to a new kind of (purchasing) power…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.