DONDENA Seminar - Fabian Drixler

You may follow the seminar at the following link.

"The Primacy of Place Over Class in the Volcanic Winters of Early Modern Japan"

SPEAKER: Fabian Drixler (Yale University)

ABSTRACT:

Between the 1630s and the 1860s, no wars were fought on Japanese soil and bubonic plague never made landfall. The most severe mortality crises were famines. These were part of larger global events but intensely local in their specifics. At least eight of the nine major famines can be tied to volcanic eruptions that altered the climate of the northern hemisphere. But within Japan, mortality varied dramatically in space. That variation was fractal, with similar patterns of stark mortality differences between macroregions, feudal domains, and all the way down to pairs of neighboring villages. Japan’s ecological diversity cannot by itself explain this phenomenon. In many areas, the strength of local solidarity shut down food export during subsistence crises. The result was that the poor in lucky villages ate while the rich in unlucky villages starved. This phenomenon, presumably not unique to early modern Japan, may invite a broader conversation about how we integrate claims on community resources and exposure to deadly risks into comparative measures of inequality. 
 

BIO: 

Fabian Drixler is Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies and Professor of History at Yale University. He specializes in the history of Japan, especially the early modern period, and in historical demography, with a focus on fertility and family planning. His research also extends into climate history and historical cartography. He believes that different fields gain by trading ideas. In this spirit, he has collaborated with political scientists to help make a recent field-changing discovery in Tokugawa history (the concepts of omote and naishō) part of the conceptual toolkit of social scientists who do not specialize in Japan. Since 2019, he has led Yale’s interdisciplinary Digital Tokugawa Lab, whose main project so far is a digital atlas of early modern Japan. He has also begun work on a global history of low fertility—how it has appeared in different times and places and often vanished again.