Workshop: Natural Resources and Human Societies in East and West

Natural resources are essential for human subsistence and form the basis of societies. As a result, societies developed complex relationships with nature and with what nature provided to humans. This not only concerned forms of societal organization but also permeated knowledge and belief systems. Societies formed institutions and practices to govern, cultivate, extract, process or preserve natural resources. They also ascribed cultural meanings and economic value to natural resources and produced knowledge and norms for how to deal with them. Therefore, resources are a useful tool to examine the entanglement of past societies with their environments.

How have ontological shifts changed attitudes towards the extraction of resources? How was human intervention into nature for the sake of producing or preserving natural resources mandated or justified? What cultivation practices and technologies were developed to facilitate the creation and extraction of resources? How aware were members of different societies of the consequences of human intervention into nature?

Conventional wisdom identifies the advent of Western capitalism as the beginning of reducing nature to a provider of resources and subsequent reckless resource extractivism. But this does not mean that premodern or non-Western societies lacked concepts of human interference in resource extraction or avoided ill effects from environmental degradation.

By bringing scholars together from Japan and Germany in both early modern and modern environmental history, this workshop facilitates the discussion and exchange of ideas about new approaches in environmental history on the research of natural resources.  It brings into conversation both research focused on time periods representing different stages of capitalist development and on two regions with differing thought and belief systems that became increasingly entangled in the modern period.