| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Robert B. Marks. Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China. (Studies in Environment and History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xix, 383. $64.95.

The message looms large in this book by Robert B. Marks that in order to understand China, it is necessary to understand ecological changes. It is never clear why that should be so. The book deals with population increase, land shortage, reclamation, the evolution of the market, and the mediation of price changes on the flow of goods in post-sixteenth-century China. Thinking about ecology adds climate, deforestation, and tigers to the list. To jazz the combination up somewhat, Marks describes the seventeenth-century crisis. Four hundred pages into the story, are we any wiser? 1

To begin with, beware of China historians who put their faith in statistics, especially when the argument hinges on the credibility of household registration reports of this or that year. The point is not that household registration reports were inaccurate but that in no period of Chinese history was household registration complete. So when the thirteenth-century population of Hainan Island superseded that of Guangzhou, there is no reason to think that migration had anything to do with it, let alone the influx of northerners (whatever that might mean) fleeing from nomadic invaders (p. 65). The great puzzle in Guangdong population density statistics are the very high twentieth-century figures reported for the mountain areas to the northeast, an area known for being the homeland of the Hakkas. Marks does not seem to have noticed that, let alone explained it. . . .

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