Japan was home to a rich tradition of natural history well before the introduction of European natural history after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In his book The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago UP, 2015), Federico Marcon documents this tradition and shows the surprising similarities between Japanese natural history from 1600 to 1900 and European natural history over the same period. Marcon's book was the subject of the Global History and Culture Centre Reading Group on 27 Feb, 2019. The book prompted discussion of the relationship between environmental history and the history of science, the value of comparing regional traditions of natural history, and the role of commodities in the history of ideas.

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