Conférence donnée dans le cadre de la table ronde "Monnaies et économies au 19e siècle" à l'occasion du programme ANR DANIM (La Dépréciation de l’Argent Monétaire et les relations Internationales) en partenariat avec le Labex TransferS.
Coordination : Georges Depeyrot, Chargé de recherches au CNRS.
Exposé de Aleksandra Majstorac Kobiljski sur la place du charbon dans l'histoire de la politique énergétique au Japon et les travaux de Shimomura Kotaro qui installa une batterie de fours à coke belges au Japon en 1904.
In 1895, Shimomura Kotaro quit his job as professor of chemistry and the head of the Harris School of Science at a missionary college in Kyoto and started learning French. Five years later, using Belgian technology he successfully set up Japan's first by-product coking plant in Osaka. What looked like a simple technology transfer was in fact a very creative process as he had to do far more than order sixteen coke ovens in Bruxelles and have them assembled in Japan. In fact, the imported ovens were useless for his purpose because they were made with good quality coal in mind, a luxury Japan did not have. Thus, rather than import Belgian technology, Shimomura had to bend it and use the ovens to do what his European colleagues were telling him was impossible, to produce good quality coke for steel industry using impure Japanese coal. Shimomura disagreed and went on to bend the rules of coking. By examining a specific case, within the context of transfer of mining technology in the nineteenth century Japan, this paper productively complicated the notions of transfer and Japan's places on the map of circulation of technical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
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Aleksandra Majstorac Kobiljski est post-doctorante CNRS au Centre d'Études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine de l'EHESS.
Spécialiste d’histoire des techniques, Aleksandra travaille sur les transferts miniers du Japon vers la Chine au début du XXe siècle. Diplômée de l’Université de Belgrade (Serbie), de la Central European University (Hongrie) et de la City University of New York, elle vient de terminer une post-doc à l’université de Harvard et rejoint le CECMC comme post-doctorante pour l’année 2011-2012.
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