A Medicated Empire

Winner of the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History


In A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's connections to Japan's emerging nation-state and empire as well as the ways in which it embraced an ideology of modern medicine as a humanitarian endeavor, Yang shows how the industry promoted a hygienic middle-class culture that was part of Japan's national development and imperial expansion.


Yang demonstrates that the company's fortunes had less to do with scientific breakthroughs and medical innovations than with Japan's web of social, political, and economic relations. He lays bare Hoshi's business strategies and its connections with politicians and bureaucrats, and he describes how public health authorities dismissed many of its products as placebos at best and poisons at worst. Combining global histories of business, medicine, and imperialism, A Medicated Empire illuminates how the development of the pharmaceutical industry simultaneously supported and subverted regimes of public health at home and abroad.