Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (review)

This is the first monograph on China in the Cambridge University Press series on environmental history, a publications project that has already produced path-breaking studies of Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. In this dense book, Robert Marks examines such familiar issues as demographic expansion, the commercialization of agriculture, and the growth of market towns in Ming and Qing China, but he adds substantial detail on the effects of climate change, the granary system, deforestation, and the destruction of natural habitat in South China. This is a major attempt to look at the ecological consequences of economic development in late imperial China. It shifts our attention from the efforts by humans to produce food and exploit resources to the interaction between humans and their natural environment. This kind of ecosystem approach to research on China adds a refreshing perspective to Chinese social and economic history, but it also tends to put too strong an emphasis on the human role in environmental change.

In keeping with the title of his book, Marks has endeavored to write a synthetic account of the fate of animals, crops, goods, and resources in the Lingnan macroregion of South China between 1400 and 1850. His major theme is that "climatic change, population, commercialization, and state action interacted to cause environmental and economic change in south China, leading to an agroeconomic system that because it was not sustainable, resulted in severe environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity" (pp. 13-14). Reading this book is somewhat like reading a traditional provincial gazetteer of China. Beginning with physical landscape, climate, forest, and wildlife, we gradually learn about human settlement, agricultural development, commercialization and marketing, and land reclamation.

This study includes a wide variety of topics in ten detailed chapters, which can be roughly divided into four major parts. The first two chapters discuss the natural environment and the human settlement of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces prior to 1400. They document the historical process by which the migration of Han settlers, the displacement of non-Han inhabitants, the avoidance of malaria-infested swamps, the construction of flood-control dikes and levees, and the growth of rice paddies all led to the creation of a fertile delta along the Pearl River in Lingnan.

Chapters 3 to 5 explore the development cycles of agricultural production, the commercialization of cash crops, and overseas trade from the mid-Ming to the high Qing. Population growth and rice cultivation initially provided the impetus to economic recovery in the Ming, followed by the diversification of cropping patterns and commercialization after 1550. Economic growth was disrupted in the mid-seventeenth century by the Manchu conquest, coastal evacuation, loss of trade, and a colder climate, but a subsequent economic boom contributed to a resumption of growth in the eighteenth century. Overseas trade stimulated a demand for raw cotton, silk, and sugar cane, and peasant farmers in the Pearl River Delta reacted positively by changing their cropping patterns for both the domestic and international markets.

Chapters 6 to 8 turn to the more quantitative analysis of climatic data, harvest yields, and rice prices. A warmer climate and better control of the causes of pestilence served to create an ecological environment that was favorable to food production. With state and local support for the construction of granaries and the exporting of rice from Guangxi to Guangdong, Lingnan developed into an integral part of the rice marketing system. The export market for rice in Guangxi also enabled the farmers of the Pearl River Delta to devote more resources to combining mulberry embankments and fishponds for the development of sericulture.

The final two chapters, however, paint a bleak picture of the consequences of land reclamation and environmental degradation in Lingnan since the late eighteenth century. Population growth and the intensification of agriculture exerted much pressure to make...