Book Project: Synthetic Nitrogen and the Dependencies of Modern Growth: Global Japan in the Creation of Unsustainable Infrastructures, 1700 to present. (Working Title)

Synthetic fertilizers are essential ingredients of modern agrarian growth, but their application in industrial agriculture comes at social and ecological costs. A substance emitted in excess of “planetary boundaries” at present, synthetic nitrogen endangers aquatic ecosystems and exacerbates global warming. Just like fossil fuels, synthetic nitrogen today represents both an essential propellant and an existential threat to the global economy. How did this ironic situation come about historically? As a contribution to the globalized and multi-disciplinary perspectives needed to understand the Anthropocene, this project studies those longstanding historical processes that turned the gradually expanding resource base of a non-Western nation into a fossil-fueled nutrient empire of global scale.

Most attempts to understand “the Great Acceleration” of anthropogenic environmental change are framed by Western historical experiences and operate at relatively recent time scales. This project, by contrast, makes two arguments: first, that non-Western archives are essential for understanding the emergence of capitalism and unsustainable infrastructures in global contexts. Second, it argues that these infrastructures, and the ideas that guided their construction, need to be studied in the longue-durée, bridging the early modern and modern periods.

Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, is a particularly important case to study, as it brought about complex commercial systems since the seventeenth century that depended on an expanding terraqueous resource base. Home to Edo (Tokyo), the largest city of the early modern world, Japan was a site of intense agricultural land use. By the late nineteenth century, it became a non-western pioneer in the “scientific” reinvention of agriculture and the systematic expansion of resource bases at sea and on shore. The country’s extremely rich, though largely “islanded” archives offer important insight on how expanding nutrient cycles have altered human-environmental and socio-political relations in the Anthropocene.

Two processes will be mapped for this analysis: the development of the archipelago’s organic resource base since the seventeenth century, and the gradual shift to synthetic and mineral nutrients after the 1890s. The first process, driven by intensifying agriculture and linked to early modern commercial development, resulted in a continuous exhaustion and further expansion of resource frontiers and in the incorporation of marine ecosystems into the archipelagic metabolism. The second process studied is the shift from organic to energy-intensive mineral and synthetic resources, an effect of economic and technological globalization. Unlike major Western economies, Japan only scaled synthetic nitrogen fixation as its chief source of fertilizers in the postwar period, in conjunction with newly gained access to the Middle Eastern petroleum necessary in the process. From a neo-materialist point of view, Japan’s postwar high growth was thus enabled by changing energy regimes and expanding resource bases.