In recent years, “diffusionism” has emerged as the most prominent bogeyman, if not straw man, for non-Eurocentric histories of science: witness proliferating critiques of Basalla, of Cold War development, of modernization theory. Such targets, however, should strike us as too easy. If we would now champion modernity as the “history of exchanges and entanglements…of the co-production of knowledge,” then we must also recognize that Eurocentric models of diffusion were not merely the construct of Euro-American labors, but actively promoted and elaborated upon by non-Western actors, for their own sensible reasons, based on their own beliefs about how knowledge moved.
This presentation outlines one portion of a more robust transnational genealogy of diffusionism. It does so by examining the rise of comparative law in Japan, and the role played by comparative legal scholars in shaping international copyright conventions premised on Eurocentric diffusionism. Arising out of philological efforts to understand Chinese rites (li), then growing though interchange with the nascent field of ethnology, Japanese comparative law developed a model of civilizational transfer that fused anthropological theory with prior concepts of Sinocentric acculturation. This model served as a key conceptual resource in Berlin, 1908, when Japanese comparative legal scholars were called upon to renegotiate the Berne Convention. Although first articulated in relation to China, Japanese scholars’ view that civilization consisted of a movement of knowledge from centers to peripheries encouraged them to support a vision of international copyright whose goal was to diffuse ideas from Europe to “less-civilized” regions of the world.
