Indian Cattle for the Japanese Empire: Environmental Crisis, Colonial Planning, and Cross-Asia Cattle Mobility in Colonial Taiwan in the 1910s

This paper examines the limits of imperial technoscience in governing colonial ecologies by analyzing Japan’s attempt to solve a cattle crisis in early twentieth-century Taiwan. By 1910, a shortage of draft animals threatened agricultural economies in Japanese Taiwan, the American-ruled Philippines, and British India, revealing shared vulnerabilities in imperial systems of governing nature. As the Japanese Empire transformed Taiwan into an agricultural hub, its modernization efforts created a “cattle paradox”: rapid farmland expansion eliminated the very pastures needed to sustain the draft oxen essential for production. While rejecting a plea for cattle from the Philippines, colonial Taiwan sought its own solution to crossbreed local cattle with the famously robust Kankrej breed from British India. The paper follows the 1910 expedition to Rajasthan led by Fujine Yoshiharu, a specialist trained in American-style agricultural science. In India, however, the universalist claims of Japanese technoscience collided with local reality. Confronted with semi-wild cattle and unfamiliar indigenous husbandry practices, Japanese scientific methods proved inadequate. The mission’s ultimate reliance on local Indian knowledge reveals a crucial aspect of imperial history: the governance of nature was not a simple top-down application of science, but a complex negotiation where imperial ambitions were disciplined by local ecological and knowledge systems. Imperial technoscience was not a monolithic tool of domination but was frequently contested and reshaped at the frontiers of empires. It argues that governing nature in colonial Asia was a negotiated process, profoundly shaped by cross-border flows of knowledge, species, and environmental pressures.