Joshua Linkous

Joshua Linkous is a historian of early modern and modern Japan with interests in economic, environmental, and political history. Prior to joining the Program in Agrarian Studies, Joshua studied at Harvard University. His dissertation “Development-Induced Scarcity and the Political Economy of Rice Agriculture in Northeastern Japan, 1590-1945,” adopts a longue durée perspective to investigate the consequences of Japan’s decision to reject alternative pathways to agricultural modernization in favor of a national self-sufficiency policy that elaborated on the peasant-based and rice-centric regime of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). In contrast to works that view induced institutional innovation or the “industrious revolution” of minute-scale labor-intensive agriculture as the key to Japan’s industrialization, it argues that Japan’s development is best understood through what he terms “development-induced scarcity,” a highly state-mediated regime of development under which technological and institutional innovation reinforced rather than transformed existing social and productive relations. It explores this dynamic in the understudied region of Northern Tohoku, tracing the political, techno-scientific, and socio-economic mechanisms that led to the institutionalization of rice monocropping and the underdevelopment of the region. The push for national self-sufficiency and the desire to bypass social reform led the state to introduce “proto–Green Revolution” innovations that concentrated power into the hands of the technocratic experimental stations and agrarianist agricultural associations. The intensification of the landscape toward the end of maximizing yields, without consideration for economic efficiency or the particularities of household reproduction, forced peasants into ever-deepening self-exploitation that generated ecological and economic immiseration, triggering a state of permanent disaster.