Robert Marks
Publisher:
Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield
Publication Date:
17 February 2017
Abstract:
This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment. Tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind, Robert B. Marks illuminates the paradoxes inherent in China’s environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China’s traditional “heroic” storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature and contacts with other peoples that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any student interested in China, past or present, or indeed in the world’s environmental future.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction: Problems and Perspectives
Chapter 2: China’s Natural Environment and Early Human Settlement to 1000 BCE
Chapter 3: States, Wars, and Farms: Environmental Change in Ancient and Early Imperial China, 1000 BCE–300 CE
Chapter 4: Deforesting the North and Colonizing the South in the Middle Imperial Period, 300–1300 CE
Chapter 5: Empire and Environment: China’s Borderlands, Islands, and Inner Peripheries in the Late Imperial Period, 1300–1800 CE
Chapter 6: Environmental Degradation in Modern China, 1800–1949
Chapter 7: “Controlling” Nature in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–Present
Chapter 8: Conclusion: China and Its Environment in World Historical Perspective
Select Bibliography
Index
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