Nature and Power: China and the Wider World

I discuss the references in Nature and Power to imperial China, especially its thorough discussion of key issues in China's environmental history, but I point out several limitations. Joachim Radkau says little about the role of local elites in agrarian policy, the impact of central Eurasian conquest on imperial regimes' attitudes toward the land, and the impact of global trade on the empire in the preindustrial age. The second part of the article discusses the important strategic and environmental role of trades in fur, tea, and fish from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.