Anniversary Forum

Why China?

Robert B. Marks

FOR AT LEAST the last two thousand years, the population of China has counted for one-quarter to one-third of all of humanity. Before 1800 and the industrially driven rise to global dominance of western Europe and northern America during the nineteenth century, China also accounted for one-third of the world's economic activity, and it was the richest and most powerful state on Earth. Given that global weight, it is not surprising that what happened in China mattered to the rest of the world.	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-89831. Three images of red cedar lumbering from the Florida Keys, 1882. Despite a wealth of scholarship, environmental historians have barely scratched the surface of the American South. Places like Florida, for example, with diverse ecosystems and communities and a complex history, merit further scholarly attention. What stories are there to be told? Lumbering in the Florida Keys, 1882.
Frederick Teggart demonstrated linkages between the Han Chinese and Roman empires, L. N. Gumilev showed that the strength of the Chinese state periodically sent nomadic warriors back across the steppe toward Europe, William McNeill argued that China's economic revolution during the Song dynasty (960–1279) pulled Europe out of the depths of the Dark Ages and toward the Renaissance, and the Mongol highway across Eurasia provided the route for the spread of the bubonic plague from southwestern China to the Black Sea and Mediterranean. More recently, Andre Gunder Frank, Richard von Glahn, and Kenneth Pomeranz have shown how China's demand for silver during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) fueled a global demand that sucked as much as half of New World silver production to China.1 It flowed out again only when British opium from its Indian colony flooded China and contributed to its late-nineteenth-century image as the "sick man of Asia."2 But what was the global environmental impact of China's huge economy and consumption of goods from around the world? With one exception, we barely know.3	2
China's great reversal of fortune during the nineteenth century—from being the wealthiest and most powerful empire for most of recorded history, to becoming poor and backward compared to the surging West—provided modern social science with many myths and preconceptions about "Oriental despotism" and other explanations for Chinese poverty and European wealth, which for most of the twentieth century have been taken to be "true." Since 1980, though, scholarship based on access to Chinese archival sources has chipped away at the underpinnings of a social science built on the contrast of a "stagnant" China with the "dynamic" West, enabling R. Bin Wong, Frank, Pomeranz, and myself, among others, to explode those myths.4	. . .