This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment, tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind.

List of Illustrations Preface to the Second Edition Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction: Problems and Perspectives Chapter 2: China’s Natural Environment and Early Human Settlement to 1000 BCE Chapter 3: States, Wars, and Farms: Environmental Change in Ancient and Early Imperial China, 1000 BCE–300 CE Chapter 4: Deforesting the North and Colonizing the South in the Middle Imperial Period, 300–1300 CE Chapter 5: Empire and Environment: China’s Borderlands, Islands, and Inner Peripheries in the Late Imperial Period, 1300–1800 CE Chapter 6: Environmental Degradation in Modern China, 1800–1949 Chapter 7: “Controlling” Nature in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–Present Chapter 8: Conclusion: China and Its Environment in World Historical Perspective Select Bibliography Index

Based in part on the author's earlier, more technical book, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (1997), this new volume presents for a more general audience the parallel story lines of episodic and long-term ecological damage and the equally long-term success of the Chinese agricultural system. Marks (Whittier College) clearly highlights the symbiotic relationship between family farming and the strategic interests of the bureaucratic state since the Qin and Han empires, and stresses the interactive role of 'Chinese' and 'non-Chinese' in 'China's' agricultural and ecological change. He places the People's Republic of China at the end of an environmental saga in four premodern stages: the growth of millet-based farming communities in the Neolithic period; the rise of the imperial state from 1000 BCE to 300 CE; the rise of high-yielding wet-rice agriculture from 300 to 1300 CE; and the increasingly unsustainable population growth of the late empire from 1300 to 1800. Marks concludes with the modern era, focusing on the PRC's huge organizational capacity to industrialize the Chinese economy. He very capably sifts through the immense secondary literature on Chinese social, political, economic, and environmental history to present a very useful synopsis of the state of the field. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries.