The creativity and innovation required to fit 'raw materials' to imported technolology

Making raw materials: innovation and imported technology in Meiji Japan

This project, published as a peer-reviewed article in History & Technology, explores coal and wood manufacturing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan as the empirical sites for understanding the material gaps between industrial inputs available locally and the affordances of imported technology. The article powerfully critiques existing accounts of technology transfer and foregrounds the creative ways in which actors approached, redesigned and manufactured raw materials locally, to make them comply with the constraints of imported technologies and to make imported technologies work on local ground. By focussing on the granular labour of matching materials to hardware through materials and process experimentation, this article nuances our understanding of raw materials in both history and localised applications of emergent materials and tech today.