Fishing Wars And Environmental Change In Late Imperial And Modern China

"Among the environmental challenges facing us is alleviating the damage to marine ecosystems caused by pollution and overfishing. Coming to grips with contemporary problems, this book argues, depends on understanding how people have historically generated, perceived, and responded to environmental change. This work explores interactions between society and environment in China’s most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s. This history of Zhoushan’s fisheries illuminates long-term environmental processes and analyzes the intersections of local, regional, and transnational ecological trends and the array of private and state interests that shaped struggles for the control of these common-pool natural resources. What institutions did private and state actors use to regulate the use of the fishery? How did relationships between social organizations and the state change over time? What types of problems could these arrangements solve and which not? What does the fate of these institutions tell us about environmental change in late imperial and modern China? Answering these questions will give us a better understanding of the relationship between past ecological changes and present environmental challenges."

Although most studies of rural society in China deal with land villages, in fact very substantial numbers of Chinese people lived by the sea, on the rivers and the lakes. In land villages, mostly given to farming, people lived in permanent houses, whereas on the margins of the waterways many people lived in boats and sheds, and developed their own marked features, often being viewed as pariahs by the rest of Chinese society. This book examines these boat and shed living people. It takes an "historical anthropological" approach, combining research in official records with investigations among surviving boat and shed living people, their oral traditions and their personal records. Besides outlining the special features of the boat and shed living people, the book considers why pressures over time drove many to move to land villages, and how boat and shed living people were gradually marginalised, often losing their fishing rights to those who claimed imperial connections. The book covers the subject from Ming and Qing times up to the present.

Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia. The Challenge of Climate Change explores East Asian cultural variations in approaching and solving environmental challenges in the past, present, and future—important perspectives from cultural studies to the current global environmental and climate crisis.

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 "he.

This book explores how fieldwork has been used to research Chinese history in the past and new ways that others might use in it the future. It introduces the previous generations of scholars who ventured out of the archive to conduct local investigations in Chinese cities, villages, farms and temples. It goes on to present the techniques of historical fieldwork, providing guidance on how to integrate oral history into research plans and archival research, conduct interviews, and locate sources in the field. Chapters by established researchers relate these techniques to specific types of fieldwork, including religion, the imperial past, natural environments and agriculture. Combining the past and the future of the craft, the book provides a rich resource for scholars coming new to fieldwork in the history of China.

The Companion to Global Environmental History offers multiple points of entry into the history and historiography of this dynamic and fast-growing field, to provide an essential road map to past developments, current controversies, and future developments for specialists and newcomers alike. Combines temporal, geographic, thematic and contextual approaches from prehistory to the present day Explores environmental thought and action around the world, to give readers a cultural, intellectual and political context for engagement with the environment in modern times Brings together environmental historians from around the world, including scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and China

This study of Sino-Tibetan northern Sichuan provides a framework for understanding changes in western China’s landscape and among its indigenous populations from late imperial to contemporary times. It highlights the significant role that Tibetans first had in shaping local institutions, markets, and natural landscapes, and then how the “modern” Chinese state later set its own indelible stamp on local people and environments. This is a story of the conflicts and contradictions that rise out of manipulation of peoples, ecologies, and identities.

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.