Material Authority
Managing Mineral Abundance in Early Modern Japan (MMA)
Material Authority (MMA) puts mines and mining at the center of Japan’s political and commercial transformations from 1520–1720.
The project recognizes that a boom in precious metal production proved decisive in shaping the archipelago’s domestic governance and foreign relations, and proposes the first comprehensive study of early modern Japan’s “mineral politics.”
The Project
Approach and Objectives
Examining mines well-known and under-appreciated alike, MMA departs from quantitative analyses measuring mineral production to investigate how authority materialized through mines, and how mines and mineral extraction authored power in Japan.
Research Themes
Material Authority integrates and interrogates landmark transitions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among them a period of protracted conflict yielding to political unification, and a rapid expansion and curtailment of foreign relations. Mines and mining feature in these accounts but have never been offered as an organizing principle by which to examine each and their effects on one another.
The project team will pursue three lines of research: exploring how mines shaped authority, catalyzed management, and facilitated exchange.
Activities and Engagement
Finally, collaborative research and co-designed seminars will spotlight scholarship on mineral politics and resource management beyond Japan and model a final goal of Material Authority: to inform inquiry into the entangled transformations in material extraction and human power across the early modern world.
