Strange Parallels and Surprising Resemblances? China and Its Environmental History

Spanning the last 3200 years, China has the longest continuous written history of any society on earth, and with between 25 and 40 percent of the world’s population at any given time in a space as large as the continental U.S., provides extensive documentation and a range of human experience for exploring its environmental history. Of course, that very continuity was made possible by long-lasting institutions (most notably a particular kind of state and economy) that constrained the kinds of interactions humans in China had with their environment. Over the past 30 years, historians with the requisite linguistic skills (in Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, and several others too) have explored aspects of China’s environmental history. Of course, some time periods and themes have been more fruitfully mined than others. China’s late imperial/early modern period with its vast archival sources as well contemporary China have yielded many significant studies, with more attention now being paid to the Han and Song eras as well. We know more about environmental issues circulating around fresh water, deforestation, soils, colonial projects, climate changes, and mental encounters with nature, for example, than we do about oceans, species extinction, non-Han peoples, or how and why agricultural land remained productive for over a centuries at a stretch. Scholarly opportunities abound.