Jonas Ruegg’s
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My projects underline that East Asian experiences of early modernity are central to understanding more recent reconfigurations of culture, ecology and international politics. In my forthcoming book The Kuroshio Frontier: Empire and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific, (Cambridge University Press, exp. 2024) I explore how maritime environments mattered in the making of modern Japan, and how Japan mattered in the making of the modern Pacific. The Kuroshio Current is an ecosystem which connects Japan, East Asia, and the Pacific, my book investigates how the pursuit of oceanic resources throughout the region shaped industries, ideologies, and local communities over the past four centuries.

Embedding national economies in global environmental contexts means to expand the scope of “history” to places beyond the immediate human habitat. My methods are based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, provide ways to overcome ahistorical units imposed by national geography and periodization, and instead, to center locations that reveal the environmental and social cost of modern life. Similar ecocritical interests also drive my ongoing investigations in the history of terraqueous fertilizer resources in the Japanese archipelago, or my research on the role of South Sea colonies in the imperial metabolism. These longue-durée studies of Japan’s oceanic frontiers therefore underline how neo-materialist analyses of engineered environments since the early modern period are essential to understanding the ecological rifts of the Anthropocene.