My dissertation argues that modern agricultural science in Japan was shaped by Confucian forms of social and intellectual organization dating from the late eighteenth century. It examines how older traditions of political, social, and agricultural knowledge became the medium through which modern agronomy was translated. More importantly, it shows how, through the operation of what I call “archaisms,” Japanese agricultural scientists disavowed their Confucian inheritances and claimed modernity, even as their scientific practices demonstrated continuity rather than revolution.

Confucianism was not incidental to Japanese agricultural science, nor did it disappear with modernity. It was reconstructed, both deliberately and unconsciously, within agricultural schools, experiment stations, colonial bureaucracies, and settlement projects. Modern science thus became a means of reviving older claims about the relationship between rulers, cultivators, and the land.

A Confucian Science follows this process across three connected settings: Hokkaido, Taiwan, and mainland Japan. It traces a two-hundred-year arc, from early modern agronomic knowledge to late twentieth-century foreign aid, showing the long, trailing life of Confucian thought as mediated by modern science. In doing so, it uncovers not only the imperial but also the premodern origins of an idiosyncratically Japanese form of foreign aid.

The project draws on government and colonial archives, agricultural periodicals, university records, personal papers, scientific publications, and premodern writings on agrarian government. More broadly, it brings the history of science into conversation with modern East Asian history, global intellectual history, the study of empire, and the history of foreign aid.