[Dissertation] Weathering History: Storms, State, and Society in South China since the Fifth Century CE

Author:
Alejandrino, Clark L.

School:
Georgetown University

Defended:
2019

Abstract:

My dissertation looks at typhoons in the history of the richest, most populous, and most typhoon-prone province of China: Guangdong. It considers political, social, cultural, and environmental aspects of typhoons from the fifth to the twentieth century and argues that successive states and generations of Chinese that occupied the province’s littoral regarded it as a "typhoon space." The real and perceived vulnerability of the Guangdong littoral inspired efforts at community- and state-building that had many consequences. In exploring the deep consciousness of storms and the social structures they inspired in a major part of China, I will contribute to both climate history and Chinese history by reimagining the spatial frameworks within which we study human interactions with the environment.

My project takes seriously the constructed nature of the Guangdong littoral as a "typhoon space" and its location in a tropical cyclone basin, arguing that its perceived vulnerability to storms across centuries was as influential in shaping its history as was the destructive force of the storms that so often came ashore. By delineating specific spaces where climatic phenomena have a deep influence on human society and culture, my project facilitates the reimagining of China, and even the world, as consisting of discrete, but at times overlapping, climate spaces. These, crucially, would not be the same as climate regions as understood by climatologists and enshrined in countless maps. Rather, they would be based both on climatic phenomena and social, cultural, and political structures that evolved to cope with climate features. Since climate spaces do not neatly coincide with the nation, province, or other familiar spatial categories, my project invites a rethinking of space in Chinese history and more globally in environmental history. Thinking in terms of climate spaces also eases comparisons by providing a common language for speaking about similar phenomena across the globe. For example, we can think of typhoon spaces in the Western Pacific and hurricane spaces in the Caribbean as comparable "storm spaces" within a transnational history of wind, water, risk, and response. It is my hope that reimagining coastal China as a typhoon space and thinking more broadly in terms of climate spaces may serve as catalysts for advancing both global environmental history and the underdeveloped field of Chinese climate history.