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1 results

  • 7 - Ecological Change and Resource Constraints

  • from Part II - 1000 to 1800
  • Edited by Debin Ma, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Richard von Glahn, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of China
    Published online:
    07 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022, pp 259-299

  • Summary

    Intricate relations between people, animals, and plants were the basis of the entire imperial Chinese order no matter what dynasty was ostensibly in charge. Such relations were environmental in the sense that they formed interdependencies between species under diverse ecological conditions of climate and topography. The most significant environmental historical result of these relations for the eight centuries under study here was agriculture, the main source of China’s human-induced (or “anthropogenic”) ecological change. An extended, instructive example of the intricacies of farming’s requisite resource management comes from the Ming (1368–1644) town of Pingwang in the Yangzi delta, likely the most developed area of contemporary imperial agrarian practice.