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The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan is a social and intellectual history of the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of a field of natural history in Japan from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It introduces the field of honzōgaku—the original name of the discipline of materia medica introduced from China, which expanded in Japan into an eclectic field of natural history—and the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development. The book surveys the ideas and practices developed by honzōgaku scholars, and reconstructs the social forces that affected their work. These included a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the styles, practices, and goals of the study of nature in early modern Japan. The primary goal of the book is to introduce the field of honzōgaku—which developed into a sophisticated discipline of knowledge about nature analogous to European natural history but independently of direct influence—and the changing Japanese views on the material environment. It also aims to reconstruct the social forces that dominated the life of scholars and cultural producers in general in early modern Europe and Japan, showing how similar social processes produced similar forms of knowledge and similar interventions in the material reality that these knowledges mediated.

The book discusses how Western technology, primarily the means of transport and manufacture, changed the Indian village during the period 1830–1980. The technology reached India in the train of colonialism, as also through corporate bodies and private enterprise. The study is based on the experience of British Bengal, an area that covered nearly the whole of eastern India for a long time—corresponding to present-day West Bengal and Bangladesh—till 1947. With Calcutta as the hub, eastern India was the gateway of technology transmission to India. Underneath the relatively known areas of technology build-up, there was an inner layer, much less known, of its transmission from the colonial metropolis to the interior. The book, a social history of technology in the main, analyses the context and results of technology induction to the village, such as the railways redrawing the morphology of rural settlements, and the new tools leading to the empowerment of artisans or their dispossession due to mechanization. The technology that had improved the quality of life in the West largely failed to mitigate poverty in rural India. The book addresses the question of why it failed to accelerate development here. Based on local-level sources, the work blends hard data with folk usage, oral tradition, songs, sayings, and vernacular literature, thereby infusing into the text both a life and a historical insight most often ignored.