Mold’s Dominion: Science, Empire, and Capitalism in a Globalizing World

Abstract

Abstract Today, Jōkichi Takamine and Albert Calmette are known for their contribution to the history of medicine. Yet their early careers centered not on medicine, but on biotechnology, and on parallel projects to bring a food processing technology used across Asia to new audiences around the world. In the end, they both succeeded, but in very different ways. Takamine would make his fortune with “Taka-Diastase,” a patent digestive aid once popular around the world; Calmette would help develop the “Amylo Process” of industrial brewing and distilling used as the basis of exploitative alcohol monopolies in colonial Indochina and Formosa. Understanding how a single technology could take on two radically different forms provides a unique opportunity to explore entanglements of science, empire, and capitalism in a globalizing world. Empires and capitalist enterprises combined to send mold along pathways that both reflected and transcended imperial boundaries. And as it traveled, mold was remade by—and in turn helped to remake—the political economies it encountered. Today, when the products of mold technologies are part of our daily lives, it’s tempting to see globalization in terms of seamless, uniform, and seemingly inevitable outcomes. This paper focuses attention instead on alternative paths, contingent and deeply inequitable processes, and the way science, empire, and capitalism produced the modern world.