Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt

Abstract

Challenging the conventional wisdom conveyed by Western environmental historians about China, this book examines the correlations between economic and environmental changes in the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi from 1400 to 1850, but also provides substantial background from 2CE on. Robert Marks discusses the impact of population growth on land-use patterns, the agro-ecology of the region, and deforestation; the commercialization of agriculture and its implications for ecological change; the impact of climatic change on agriculture; and the ways in which the human population responded to environmental challenges. This book is a significant contribution to both Chinese and environmental history. It is groundbreaking in its methods and in its findings.

Religion in Conservation and Management

“…In general, Chinese religion and philosophy separate religion from secular domains, and spirituality from magic and from natural knowledge, but with weak and porous boundaries. Yet the Chinese conserved village groves and not remote forests; they protected some animals, not others (Elvin 2004;Marks 1998). They had to manage water and soil well in rice agroecosystems (Anderson 1988) because survival depended on this, but they did not always manage well in rainfall-fed upland agriculture.…”

Re-thinking the Late Imperial Chinese Economy: Development, Disaggregation and Decline, circa 1730–1930

“…(Lingnan in particular continued to experience significant population growth -though lower than the all-China average -until much later, in part because its rice yields, still inferior to those in the Yangzi Delta in 1850, caught up and even surpassed them later. 58 ) What one has instead is a rather impressive adjustment in these advanced areas to changing conditions in the rest of China. It only looks feeble because we are accustomed to comparing it to what happened in Europe during the same period.…”

“…This made them less dependent on purchased food than, for instance, the very specialised producers of the Caribbean. 90 And in some highland areas of Hunan, the spread of assorted secondary grain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even transformed former food deficit counties into net exporters. 91 But these were considered inferior foods, and it still seems very likely that some of the rice that used to go downriver now instead went up into the hills.…”

Untitled

“…This article demonstrates that nineteenth-century Cantonese access to southern Pacific capital and resources also contributed to environmental change near Guangzhou. 132 Several fruitful areas of comparison are also opened up through studying Cantonese-New Zealand exchanges. For example, did environmental change by overseas Chinese in Gold Mountain and New Gold Mountain represent the same drive to exploit China's 'internal' frontiers as was evident in late Qing Mongolia, Manchuria, and Yunnan?…”