Sediments of Time 2 Part Paperback Set: Environment and Society in Chinese History

by Mark Elvin , Ts'ui-jung Liu

• ISBN13: 9780521135696
• ISBN10: 0521135699
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Package
• Copyright: 2009-07-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays is the first relatively comprehensive survey of the environmental history of China. Written by some of the world's leading Western and Chinese experts, Sediments of Time crystallises a new and distinct field of scholarship that studies what happens when human social systems interact with the rest of the natural world. This book shows how deforestation, land-reclamation, settlement, and water-control, when mixed with an ever-changing climate, shape a distinct and often precarious environment. Pioneering essays explore new methodologies of historical environmental research, comparative perspectives setting China in the context of the West and Japan, and the impact of the early modern ecological transformation on the spread of diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis. This is an indispensable book for anyone who wants to understand either the foundations of modern China, or the deeper origins of many of China's most daunting contemporary challenges.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

The context

China's environmental history in world persepective

Interpreting the physical environment

Man's impact on the vegetation and landscape in the Inner Himalaya and Tibet

The villagers' view of environmental history in Yunnan province

Human Seettlement

Environment versus water control

Han immigration and the settlement of Taiwan

The Frontiers: Highlands and lowlands

Population and ecology along the frontier in Qing China

Water

Clear waters versus muddy waters

Action at a distance

Weather and Climate

'It never used to snow'

Changes in climate, land, and human efforts

Diseases

Cholera in China, 1820-1930

Environment and tuberculosis in modern China

Representations of the environment - the offical mind

From the Yellow River to the Huai

Official thinking on environmental issues and the state's environmental roles in eighteenth-century China

Representations of the environment - literary and popular sensibility

Ecologism versus moralism

Water, love, and labour

The environment and early modern economic growth in Taiwan and Japan

Non-reclamation deforestation in Taiwan, circa 1600-1976

Hydro-electricity and industrialization

Environmental problems and perceptions in early industrial Japan

Index

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