Of the new schools that have risen in the gardens of history around the world, environmental history is one that has seen exponential growth over the past decades. While writing a review essay in 2003, John R. McNeill, an acclaimed specialist in environmental history from the US, cited an example that attested to the field’s rapid expansion: When Richard White surveyed the field back in 1985, he spent a whole afternoon reading its publications. But McNeill found that in the past 30 years, the publications in environmental history has increased by over a hundred times; he must devote much more time than White did to going over them for undertaking the same task.Footnote1 Indeed, owing to rising concerns about environmental challenges, such as the world's unprecedented high level of carbon dioxide emissions, the field of environmental history has grown tremendously in more recent years, perhaps much more so than the time when McNeill wrote his piece two decades ago. More importantly, this concern has resonated globally, as evidenced by the robust interest in environmental history among Chinese historians in recent decades. It is one of the main reasons for editing this special issue.
Granted, the significant advance of environmental history study is a recent phenomenon. Yet its recency does not suggest that the environmental impact on history has aroused interest only in our times. In fact, over the past centuries, there have been important philosophical and historical studies that have explored the relationship between the environment and human history. While intended as a treatise on the origins of laws from a comparative cultural perspective, Charles Montesquieu’s (1689–1755) The Spirit of Law was a pioneering text that discussed how the differences between political systems and cultural traditions stemmed from different environmental influences. Well known for its emphasis on human action in changing the world, the Marxist school of history also produced thinkers such as Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) who speculated on the dialectic relationship between environmental factors and historical change. And Plekhanov was not alone. At the turn of the twentieth century when he published his work, European historians developed a vigorous interest in seeking an alliance between historical study and such emergent social sciences as economics, sociology, psychology, and geography. Small wonder that Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), a cofounder of the Annales School, wrote one of his first books on geography and history, entitled A Geographical Introduction to History. Its original French title was La Terre et l’évolution humaine: introduction géographique à l’histoire, which meant “the earth and human evolution”; the English title was the translation of its subtitle. A more important study, with a far-reaching influence, was Fernand Braudel’s (1902–1985) Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. A student of Febvre’s, Braudel expanded on his teacher’s interest in the role of the environment in shaping history. Published in 1949, the work has been hailed as a masterpiece in twentieth-century historiography. And Braudel’s main contribution was that he, as expected by reading his book’s title, prioritized the environmental factor (the distinct and immobile environment of the Mediterranean) over other elements, e.g., political actions taken by individual rulers such as Philip II, in influencing the course of history. In so doing, Braudel dealt a mighty blow to the tradition of Rankean historiography from the late nineteenth century, on which the modern historical profession rested. For Ranke and his followers promoted the writing of political history, based on the critical use of archival sources, as the mainstream of historical writing.
By challenging the Rankean tradition, Braudel’s work corresponded and coincided with the emergence of many new currents in postwar historiography. The rise of environmental history in the US was a telling example. Rachel Carson’s (1907–1964) Silent Spring was a seminal text, as was Lynn White, Jr’s (1907–1987) article in Nature: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Their seminality was shown in both history and historiography; both helped give rise to the interest in studying environmental elements in historical writing and the environmentalist movement in general. During the 1970s, several groundbreaking books were published, among them Alfred Crosby’s (1931–2018) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, J. Donald Hughes’ (1932–2019) Ecology in Ancient Civilizations, and Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. And American Society for Environmental History too was founded in 1976, the first in the Anglophone world. The Society sponsored the publication of the Environmental Review (now Environmental History), a major journal that has since played an instrumental role in promoting the field. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the study of environmental history made more impressive strides, characterized by its advocacy of interdisciplinary methods in historiography and its transnational outlook on modern historical development; both were germane to the endeavor, pursued simultaneously by other new progresses in urban history, labor history, material cultural study, memory study, and women’s and gender history, for broadening the scope of historical research and transcending the legacy of Rankean historiography in the historical profession. Beginning in the twenty-first century, environmental history further expanded its transnational approach by taking an active part in advancing global history. I.G. Simmon’s Global Environmental History (2008), Donald Hughes’ An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life (2009), The Environment and World History (2009), edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, Anthony Penna’s The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (2010), and Edmund Russell’s Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (2011) are clear evidence.
To some extent, the rapid rise of environmental history in China today rubbed off on the robust ascension of environmental-history study, especially its “global turn,” which the world has witnessed since the dawn of the new century. Mei Xueqin and Wang Lihua’s articles in this issue both acknowledge the foreign influence on advancing environmental history in twenty-first century China. Mei is also the translator of Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, which, arguably the first comprehensive study of Chinese history from an environmental perspective in any language, was first published by Yale University Press in 2004. A prominent China scholar taught respectively at Glasgow, Oxford, and Australian National University, Elvin is known for his macroscopic interpretation of Chinese history. As a pioneering and massive work (about 600 pages in length) on tackling the environmental issues in traditional China, his study continued his earlier work, entitled The Pattern of the Chinese Past, that aimed to provide a general understanding of the vicissitudes of the historical development in imperial China. Unsurprisingly, Elvin also discusses “patterns” as the first part (and, in my opinion, the central part) in writing this book. His discovery in it is that the economic development achieved in different periods of Chinese history was detrimental to the Chinese environment, or, in his own description, “classical Chinese culture was as hostile to forests as it was fond of individual trees.” He then goes on to analyze the various causes, cultural as well as economic and political, of the environmental transformation he depicts in the book.Footnote2 The influence of Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants has been multifaceted, acknowledged not only by Mei Xueqin, his translator, but also by Fan Jingjing, its main critic, whose review article is also included in this issue. In addition to introducing the perspective of environmental history, Elvin’s use of various types of sources, literary as well as historical, in writing the book has precipitated many discussions in the Chinese historical community. Besides Elvin, Chinese environmental historians have also paid much attention to the study of Robert M. Marks who, though junior to Elvin, has enjoyed the same level of respect as another forerunner in cultivating the field.Footnote3
When it comes to pioneering Chinese scholars in environmental history, Bao Maohong, who teaches at Peking University, is a notable example. Trained mainly in Asian history at Peking University before launching his teaching career there, Bao is one of the first among his peers who turned to environmental history during the 1990s. His subsequent visits to both Japan and the US put him in touch with his counterparts outside China, including collaborating with John R. McNeill in the latter’s collective project. Bao is also one of first who praised Elvin’s study, recommending the latter’s innovative contribution in both perspicacity and methodology, for the burgeoning group of Chinese environmental historians. Over the past decade, Bao has also helped trained the first generation of doctoral students in environmental historical study in China.
While the role of China scholars from the Anglophone world has been instrumental in promoting environmental history in China, the great expansion of the field in the country has also a good deal to do with its own culture and history, past and present. As alluded to by both Wang Lihua and Mei Xueqin, besides the Soviet influence in shaping Marxist historiography in the formative years of the People’s Republic, which exposed Chinese historians to, for example, Plekhanov’s discussion of the environmental impact in the change of history, the long-held belief in the harmonious relationship between Heaven and humanity, or tianren heyi 天人合一(lit. “Heaven and humans as one”), tracing back to early Han China (206 BCE − 220 CE), nurtured a major element for the respect, or fear, of nature in traditional Chinese culture. On the other side, China’s economic expansion in the post-Mao periods over the last four decades, whose magnitude surely surpassed that of all the previous economic developments in China’s past described in Mark Elvin and Robert Marks’ books, also posed a daunting challenge to the preservation of its environment. In fact, as discussed by Zou Yilin at the outset of his article in this issue, the environmental degradation in China has reached an unprecedented level in its history. A renowned historical geographer at Fudan University in Shanghai, where he taught over 40 years before his death in 2020, Zou also once directed the University’s well-known Research Center of Historical Geography. The study of historical geography has had a long history in China and flourished, in particular, from the late imperial to the modern period. Over the decades, environmental history has become one of the Center’s strong foci, which helps foster specialists in and bolster the growth of environmental history. Wang Jian’ge, another contributor to this issue, received his advanced degree from and is currently working at the Center.
Now let us turn to the articles selected for this issue. The first one was by Zou Yilin who established his specialty in the study of canals and rivers in China. In this general overview of the environmental changes in Chinese history, Zou discussed the difficulties the country faced in maintaining a balance between population growth and environmental protection. To him, there were indeed more painful lessons than proud successes the modern Chinese can learn from the historical experience, for almost every “golden period” that appeared in the past was achieved at the expense of the environment. The glorious Han dynasty, for instance, defeated the Xiongnu and expanded its territory into the Ordos Loop. By turning the plateau into farmland, it improved agricultural production for the time being, but the end result was that an irrevocable desertification occurred subsequently in the whole region. A similar situation was also observed in the Tang period (618–907). After its rule over several centuries, the Yellow River region, once it “was the most developed, most brilliant economy, politics, and culture” of the entire country, gradually became one that is “subjected to frequent disasters and economic poverty in modern times.” His exhortation (also his thesis in writing this article in my view) to the readers is that, looking at the course of history, “the various political, economic, and cultural activities of human society are restricted by the natural environment, and these restrictions have not fundamentally changed all the way up until today, when human science and technology have developed to the point where we can land on the moon.”
Echoing Zou Yilin, Wang Lihua, a distinguished professor of Nankai University known for his many valuable studies in environmental history, argues in his contribution to this issue that, from a Marxist perspective, the human-nature relationship, centered on the “living individuals,” ought to be the “first premise” in both historical thinking and writing. From this starting point, he advocates the need for Chinese historians to borrow and absorb new methods from such social sciences as ecology in order to establish “life-centered historical thinking.” In particular, he believes that the idea of considering the human-nature relationship as a “web,” put forth by American environmental historians, is a useful concept. For it is aimed at promoting a “holistic view” of history. And this way of thinking, Wang finds, also resonates with the ancient Chinese wisdom on the heaven-humanity correlation. The challenge is how to integrate the two and mingle them into a base on which Chinese environmental history builds.
Mei Xueqin, another established Chinese scholar in the field of environmental history, is the third contributor to this special issue. A professor of history at Qinghua University, she is now directing a large, state-funded project to compile a multi-volume work on environmental history around the world. Like Wang Lihua, Mei also believes that Chinese practitioners of environmental history should learn from their foreign counterparts. Meanwhile, she maintains that some elements from the earlier Chinese cultural tradition should be tapped to support its further growth. As both a practitioner in and promoter of the field, Mei offers her thoughtful discussions of the rise, change, and future development of environmental history in China and its possible contribution to the genre’s progression beyond China. At the end, she conveys her belief (as does Wang Lihua in his writing) that environmental history not only has its own value, but its development has also borne on the change of historical writing at large.
From a cross-cultural perspective, Wang Jian’ge’s article examines the changing attitudes toward the country landscape of Jiangnan (the Yangzi Delta region) from approximately the nineteenth century to the present. An interesting and meaningful study, his goal in writing it is to see how the physical change in China’s most affluent region has been reflected in landscape culture. Drawing mostly on the journals and memoirs left by Europeans who visited Jiangnan in the period, he reconstructs the rural scenery praised by these foreign visitors. They appreciated the calmness and idleness, similar to the appreciation expressed by the Chinese literati in their essays and poems. While this seems to be an enduring intellectual tradition in landscape culture, he hastens to add, there is another more powerful one emerging from the early years of the People’s Republic. Following the Soviet example, the Chinese government introduced policies that changed the rural landscape while pursuing collectivization in the name of modernizing agriculture. According to Wang, this new change in China’s countryside in Jiangnan (and elsewhere) caused irreversible environmental degradation, registered acutely and accurately in the changed attitude toward the meaning of the landscape in Chinese culture.
Last but not least, Fan Jingjing, a doctoral student at Shandong University who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Qinghua University, wrote a detailed and extensive critique of Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants and its reception in China. On the one hand, like other Chinese scholars, Fan appreciates Elvin’s use of myriad sources in writing the book. She considers Elvin’s approach an innovation in historical methodology. On the other hand, Fan discusses a series of errors and inaccuracies she finds in Elvin’s book. In particular, she expresses her clear reservation regarding Elvin’s use of poetic sources, arguing the need to carefully consider the general issues of “determinacy” and “suitability” as well as “factual judgments” and “value judgments” in historical writing. From the same methodological perspective, she also shares her thoughts on the prospect of the study of environmental history in the future in the later part of her review. Her reflections, to some extent, suggest the growing interest among young scholars in the environmental challenge facing our earth. By and large, it is in response to this strong interest that this special issue is edited.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 J.R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (Dec. 2003): 5.
2 Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), quotes on xvii–xviii.
3 All of Robert M. Marks’ publications, along with John R. McNeill and other environmental historians’ studies, have appeared in Chinese and been well received in recent years.