Robert B. Marks

Anniversary Forum

Why China?

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.

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

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

Environmental historians of China have contributed significantly to these broader scholarly trends. With two thousand years of a (more or less) unified empire, and three thousand years of written records, China presents a unique opportunity to understand the long-term relationship between the ways in which people have changed their environment and the way in which that changed environment has affected the range of human action. But it was not until the 1990s that one could speak of the emergence of the field of Chinese environmental history. The defining event was the 1993 Conference on the History of the Environment in China that brought together most of the historians around the world working on various aspects of environmental change in China. The published conference papers constitute the best summary of the state of the field.⁵

Despite the richness of China's historical documents, the length of its history, and its weight in human affairs, the development of Chinese environmental history faces numerous challenges. Most immediately, more scholars need to enter the field, cognizant of the difficulties of learning the Chinese language. But even with the necessary language skills, conceptual challenges abound. Just think about the size and diversity of the place we call China. Historians of China—larger than the United States and arguably with more ecosystems than any other country—have recognized the utility of regional approaches. Even then, the regions are the size of European countries; my own work on the region of South China known as Lingnan encompassed an area as large as France and with a population even larger.⁶ Nonetheless, this regional approach has yielded numerous excellent studies, although still too few to enable a general environmental history of China.

That is not to say that there are no national-level studies, for there are, especially for the People's Republic of China, 1949-present.⁷ But for the longer historical perspective that China makes possible—two- to three-thousand years—such a history requires an historian of exceptional skill and maturity. To date, only one scholar has taken on this huge task. Mark Elvin's Retreat of the Elephants is a magnificent book (but hardly the last word) , taking the very long-term view of history, blending his own original research with other studies, and exploring the ways in which Chinese understood their relationship with the environment. Acknowledging the chasm between the reality of the massive remaking of the environment at the hands of Chinese farmers and the state, and the assumption that the Chinese had a more environmentally friendly view of the place of people in the environment (as, for example, in their famed landscape paintings), Elvin suggests that whereas Chinese may have loved individual trees, they hated forests.⁸

Perhaps that continuing attitude helps explain why there are so few Chinese environmental historians, and why such a field of inquiry does not yet exist in China. But hopefully that will change, as concern with contemporary environmental issues prompts Chinese scholars to examine the historical origins of current problems. And if, in addition, more Western historians learn Chinese, we will be better positioned to gain a more synthetic picture of China's environmental history and its place in global processes. My guess is that premodern processes of environmental change have been global for quite some time, and that China will turn out to have been a significant driving force of premodern global environmental change.

Robert B. Marksis Deihl Professor of History at Whittier College. His most recent works include The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Rowan and Littlefield, 2002), and Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998).

Notes

^1. Frederick John Teggart, Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939); L. N. Gumilev, Searches for the Imaginary Kingdom of Prester John, trans. R. E. F. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); William McNeill, "The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years," Journal of World History 1 (1990): 1-21; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

^2. Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750–1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

^3. J. R. McNeill, "Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific," Journal of World History 5 (1994): 299–349.

^4. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Frank, ReOrient; Pomeranz, Great Divergence; Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

^5. Mark Elvin and Tsui-jung Liu, Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

^6. Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

^7. See especially two works by Vaclav Smil, The Bad Earth (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1984), and China's Environmental Crisis (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1993); and Judith Shapiro, Mao's War on Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

^8. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 47–48, 324.

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