Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt

Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt
Title Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt PDF eBook
Author Robert Marks
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 409
Release 1998-02-28
Genre History
ISBN 113942551X

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Challenging conventional Western wisdom, Marks examines the relationship between economic and environmental changes in the imperial Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi (a region historically known as Lingnan, 'South of the Mountains') from 1400 to 1850.

Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt

Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt
Title Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt PDF eBook
Author Robert Marks
Publisher
Pages 383
Release 1998-02-28
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 9780521591775

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Groundbreaking study of the correlations between economic and environmental changes in imperial Chinese Lingnan from 1400 to 1850.

The Unending Frontier

The Unending Frontier
Title The Unending Frontier PDF eBook
Author John F. Richards
Publisher Univ of California Press
Pages 700
Release 2003-05-15
Genre Nature
ISBN 9780520939356

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It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach—and their numbers—as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history, The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period. John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. The Unending Frontier considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humans—whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes—altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia
Title Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia PDF eBook
Author Ts'ui-jung Liu
Publisher Springer
Pages 313
Release 2016-04-08
Genre History
ISBN 1137572310

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Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia critically examines modernization's long-term environmental history. It suggests new frameworks for understanding as inter-related processes environmental, social, and economic change across China and Japan.

Environmental History in the Pacific World

Environmental History in the Pacific World
Title Environmental History in the Pacific World PDF eBook
Author J.R. McNeill
Publisher Routledge
Pages 297
Release 2022-03-01
Genre History
ISBN 135193967X

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This volume brings together a set of key articles from the last 30 years pertaining to the environmental history of the Pacific basin. It aims to treat the islands and waters of the Pacific as well as the lands around the Rim, from New Zealand to Japan, to California, to Chile, and is the first work of environmental history to take this inclusive view of the Pacific basin. The focus is mainly on recent centuries but, as environmental history requires, at times the work also takes the very long view of millennia. Several of the articles seek to bring a broad Pacific perspective to bear on their subjects, while others use Pacific-basin examples to try to establish broader theoretical points of interest to all who are drawn to the study of the interactions between nature and culture. The book includes a bibliography of Pacific-basin environmental history and an introduction that aims to sketch the contours and possible future directions of the field.

China

China
Title China PDF eBook
Author Robert B. Marks
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages 462
Release 2011-12-16
Genre History
ISBN 1442212772

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This deeply informed and beautifully written book provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Focusing on the interaction of humans and their environment, Robert B. Marks traces changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a quarter of humankind. Through both word and image, this work illuminates the chaos and paradox inherent in China’s environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China’s traditional “heroic” storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any reader interested in China, past or present. Indeed he argues successfully that all of humanity has a stake in China’s environmental future.

In the Land of Tigers and Snakes

In the Land of Tigers and Snakes
Title In the Land of Tigers and Snakes PDF eBook
Author Huaiyu Chen
Publisher Columbia University Press
Pages 177
Release 2023-03-21
Genre Religion
ISBN 0231554648

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Animals play crucial roles in Buddhist thought and practice. However, many symbolically or culturally significant animals found in India, where Buddhism originated, do not inhabit China, to which Buddhism spread in the medieval period. In order to adapt Buddhist ideas and imagery to the Chinese context, writers reinterpreted and modified the meanings different creatures possessed. Medieval sources tell stories of monks taming wild tigers, detail rituals for killing snakes, and even address the question of whether a parrot could achieve enlightenment. Huaiyu Chen examines how Buddhist ideas about animals changed and were changed by medieval Chinese culture. He explores the entangled relations among animals, religions, the state, and local communities, considering both the multivalent meanings associated with animals and the daily experience of living with the natural world. Chen illustrates how Buddhism influenced Chinese knowledge and experience of animals as well as how Chinese state ideology, Daoism, and local cultic practices reshaped Buddhism. He shows how Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism developed doctrines, rituals, discourses, and practices to manage power relations between animals and humans. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including traditional texts, stone inscriptions, manuscripts, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary book bridges history, religious studies, animal studies, and environmental studies. In examining how Buddhist depictions of the natural world and Chinese taxonomies of animals mutually enriched each other, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes offers a new perspective on how Buddhism took root in Chinese society.