This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape. Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time. Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China’s present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.

The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China

Business & Money

Elvin, Mark

Economics

Yale University Press

A landmark account of China’s environmental history—by an internationally pre-eminent China specialist
 This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape. Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time. Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China’s present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.

History

Asia

The first comprehensive survey of Chinese environmental history, this book crystallizes a new field of scholarship that studies the creation of distinct environments as a result of the interaction of human social systems with the natural world. Pioneering essays explore new methodologies of historical environmental research, comparisons of China with the West and Japan, and the impact of the early modern ecological transformation on the spread of disease. An indispensable book for those trying to understand the foundations of modern China or the origins of many of contemporary China's most daunting challenges.

Sediments of Time 2 Part Paperback Set: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Studies in Environment and History)

Liu, Ts'ui-jung

Cambridge University Press

The first comprehensive survey of Chinese environmental history, this book crystallizes a new field of scholarship that studies the creation of distinct environments as a result of the interaction of human social systems with the natural world. Pioneering essays explore new methodologies of historical environmental research, comparisons of China with the West and Japan, and the impact of the early modern ecological transformation on the spread of disease. An indispensable book for those trying to understand the foundations of modern China or the origins of many of contemporary China's most daunting challenges.

Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Studies in Environment and History)

These essays are comparative studies of developments in China in the context of contemporaneous developments in Europe. Features in China's history, society, geography, and developments in technology, industry, demography and literature are scrutinised and provide insights into developments in China spanning a thousand years.

Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective (University of Sydney East Asian Series)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Univ of Hawaii Pr

Analyzes the social and economic factors that enabled the Chinese Empire to remain united as other empires collapsed and explores the conditions that shaped the technical revolution of the fourteenth century and the period of stagnation that followed

The Pattern of the Chinese Past

Stanford University Press

A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.

Changing Stories in the Chinese World

This book is an innovative attempt to convey something of how it has felt since the early nineteenth century to be Chinese. It is based on the assumption that people live their lives in stories, or as if they themselves were in stories―stories that are largely a social inheritance but are also in some measure self-created or at least continually adapted, edited, or extended. The author describes and interprets some of the most important stories through which the Chinese have lived their lives in the last two hundred years and their understanding of them. He shows how largely forgotten works of popular literature, novels and poems in particular, can admit the reader to a number of different emotional worlds. Together they suggest that there is no such thing as the Chinese story, let alone mind, but rather a historical palimpsest of extraordinary and often internally contradictory complexity. The book begins with an examination of Li Ruzhen's Destinies of the Flowers in the Mirror, which reveals a microcosm of the educated Chinese world predating major Western influences. Balancing this emphasis on the elite are the poems collected by Zhang Yingchang in Our Dynasty's Bell of Poesy, which portray the universe of peasants, women, artisans, soldiers, and prisoners. A bestseller of the 1930's, Tides in the Human Sea, shows the 'crisis of absurdity' that arises when feelings no longer coincide with inherited patterns of behavior as modernization begins to take hold. Hao Ran's Children of the Western Sands, a popular Communist work of the early 1970's, allows us to be drawn into at least a momentary empathy with the idealism of the Maoist faithful. Almost as different as can be imagined is The Bastard, by Sima Zhongyuan, one of Taiwan's most widely read writers. Its characters interpret the Communist revolution in terms derived from traditional Chinese religion, as a deserved punishment inflicted on the Chinese for the filthy impropriety of their sexual conduct. The final work considered is a book of essays, A Commonplace Fellow, by Yuan Ze'nan, a Chinese-American writer who has reached the point where his Chineseness has all but vanished, and who is consciously exploring its disappearance.

This book is an innovative attempt to convey something of how it has felt since the early nineteenth century to be Chinese. It is based on the assumption that people live their lives in stories, or as if they themselves were in stories―stories that are largely a social inheritance but are also in some measure self-created or at least continually adapted, edited, or extended. The author describes and interprets some of the most important stories through which the Chinese have lived their lives in the last two hundred years and their understanding of them. He shows how largely forgotten works of popular literature, novels and poems in particular, can admit the reader to a number of different emotional worlds. Together they suggest that there is no such thing as the Chinese story, let alone mind, but rather a historical palimpsest of extraordinary and often internally contradictory complexity. The book begins with an examination of Li Ruzhen's Destinies of the Flowers in the Mirror, which reveals a microcosm of the educated Chinese world predating major Western influences. Balancing this emphasis on the elite are the poems collected by Zhang Yingchang in Our Dynasty's Bell of Poesy, which portray the universe of peasants, women, artisans, soldiers, and prisoners. A bestseller of the 1930's, Tides in the Human Sea, shows the 'crisis of absurdity' that arises when feelings no longer coincide with inherited patterns of behavior as modernization begins to take hold. Hao Ran's Children of the Western Sands, a popular Communist work of the early 1970's, allows us to be drawn into at least a momentary empathy with the idealism of the Maoist faithful. Almost as different as can be imagined is The Bastard, by Sima Zhongyuan, one of Taiwan's most widely read writers. Its characters interpret the Communist revolution in terms derived from traditional Chinese religion, as a deserved punishment inflicted on the Chinese for the filthy impropriety of their sexual conduct. The final work considered is a book of essays, A Commonplace Fellow, by Yuan Ze'nan, a Chinese-American writer who has reached the point where his Chineseness has all but vanished, and who is consciously exploring its disappearance.

This volume is an examination of the interaction of Chinese with their environment from ancient times to the present, yielding insights into the relationship between humans and nature. The only wild elephants in the People's Republic of China today are those in a few protected enclaves in the Southwest, up against the border with Burma. Where did they all go? The most obvious explanation is that it was the result of a protracted war with human beings which the elephants lost. Basically, Chinese farmers and elephants do not mix. In The Retreat of the Elephants, Mark Elvin views Chinese history through the changing relationships between people and environmental systems that both supported and threatened them, often in complex ways. The settled regions of China are some of the most intensely developed and densely settled environments on earth. Irrigation scars the landscape, and the forests have all but disappeared. Elvin's history investigates the social and economic forces that drove the long-term environmental transformation of China.

Retreat Of The Elephants: China's History From An Environmental Perspective

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Elvin, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Elvin, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Elvin, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China

The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China

Sediments of Time 2 Part Paperback Set: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Studies in Environment and History)

Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Studies in Environment and History)

Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective (University of Sydney East Asian Series)

The Pattern of the Chinese Past

The Pattern of the Chinese Past

Changing Stories in the Chinese World

Changing Stories in the Chinese World

Retreat Of The Elephants: China's History From An Environmental Perspective