Joshua Batts is awarded a Starting Grant by the ERC

Joshua Batts, researcher of the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies, has won one of the Starting Grants awarded this year to young and early-career researchers by the European Research Council (ERC). In this call, a total of 494 young researchers will receive grants under the Horizon Europe programme, with a total funding of 780 million euros for projects of excellence.
 
Joshua Batts is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies, and is a core team member of the project “Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592–1598,” hosted at the UAB. He is a historian of encounter in the early modern world, specialising in Japan’s engagement and estrangement with other societies. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 2017 and continued his research for two years as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo. From 2019-2022 he worked as a Research Associate in Japanese Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Dr. Batts’ first monograph, Pacific Overtures: Tokugawa Outreach to Habsburg Spain, 1600–1625, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. The work explores Tokugawa Japan’s attempts to establish direct, trans-Pacific trade with Spanish America in the early seventeenth century, and Habsburg Spain’s efforts to stymie the endeavour across three continents. His work as part of the Aftermath Project investigates how the Imjin War contributed to the ensuing “Tokugawa Peace” that endured in Japan by shaping the administration and oversight of resources, human and mineral alike. These ideas support Dr. Batts’ next monograph-length project on mining and minting in Tokugawa Japan, a study that will intertwine the influence of foreign communities and technologies with the shogunate’s approach to domestic governance.
 
Material Authority: Managing Mineral Abundance in Early Modern Japan (MMA)
 
Material Authority reassesses the political, commercial, and social changes in early modern Japan through study of the archipelago’s mines from 1520–1720. Exploring the mineral politics of mines both well-known (Iwami, Sado, Ashio) and less-appreciated (Ikuno, Naganoburi), the project asks how authority materialised through mines, and how minerals and mineral extraction authored power in the archipelago. Material Authority integrates many of the landmark transitions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: political unification emerging out of protracted conflict; Japan’s emergence as a global silver power; and the rapid expansion and curtailment of foreign relations, often presented as Japan’s “Christian Century”. Mines inhabit the intersection of all three narratives and offer a compelling perspective from which to examine each, and their effects on one another. Scattered throughout the archipelago, mines ordered the geography of Tokugawa power, even as the shogunate constructed an agrarian order. A boom-and-bust cycle across multiple precious metals drove foreign exchange and encouraged its eventual curtailment. The project team will pursue three lines of research: exploring how mines shaped authority, catalysed management, and facilitated exchange. A paleography seminar will facilitate collaboration and develop skills honed by archival and on-site research conducted in Japan. A research seminar will feature presentations on mineral politics across the early modern world and model a final goal of Material Authority: to inform the broader question of how resources shaped geographies of power and encounter in an era of dynamic exchange.