The King's Harvest

As the scale of the global biodiversity crisis percolates into the popular consciousness, there remains a tacit assumption that the sixth mass extinction event in our planet's history is an inadvertent biproduct of certain human activities. Brian Lander's environmental history of early China drives home the point that, far from an unintended consequence, simplifying ecologies was the goal of the consolidating political forms that coalesced into the agricultural and hydrological state that culminated in the Qin empire. Simplifying ecologies, moreover, went hand in hand with homogenizing diverse human cultures. In his telling, the seeds of this process can be traced to over six millennia ago. It matured into the Qin innovation of imperial China, the core practices of which remain very much with us down to the present day, at ever greater scales and degrees of intensity.The King's Harvest is the environmental history of a region that came to acquire subcontinental—and eventually global—significance. The book focuses on the Guanzhong basin, where the Yellow River meets the Wei between the Loess Plateau to the north and the Qinling mountain range to the south. This is “the heartland of Chinese civilization” (2), which developed the cultural norms and institutional practices that that would come to define civilization throughout East Asia. Drawing on archaeological findings and the pre-Qin and Qin-Han textual corpus, the book consists of six chapters as well as an introduction and epilogue.The first chapter is an expansive meditation on the “nature of political power” (pun intended): it elaborates on the ecological impacts of the centralization of political power over time, with humans embedded in ecological networks that they both consciously manipulated and of which they remained obtuse. Proceeding chronologically, the following chapters concentrate on the propagation of anthropogenic landscapes (chapter 2) and political consolidation as a motor of cultural and ecological homogenization (chapter 3). The next two chapters are both on the Qin: first its six centuries as a regional kingdom under the Zhou, then its impactful but short-lived transformation into an empire under King Zheng. The final chapter rockets through more than 2,200 years in eleven pages, underscoring how the material related in the previous chapters set the course for not only China but all of East Asia. Here Lander understates his case, refraining from pointing out that the extractive processes he has described now play out on a global scale, with state-sponsored Chinese resources grabs from the forests, fisheries, and mines of Africa, South and Central America, and beyond.1In extending and elaborating upon Mark Elvin's seminal 1993 essay “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” Lander demonstrates a cogent ability to think ecologically. Chapter 2—which builds on his previous work with Katherine Brunson establishing a baseline for mammalian species in North China in the early Holocene—can feel like walking through a diorama at a natural history museum. This approach establishes a clear contrast to the impending explosion of domesticated animals crowding out wild competitors; a process in which—along the lines of the essay “On Herding People” in the Guanzi—we humans were included. Lander also engages in the exemplary practice of defining his terminology concisely without being sidetracked by debates on nomenclature.This reader would have appreciated a brief programmatic statement as to when, why, and how the author chose meaningful units of comparison. The phrases “in human history” and “in world history” crop up frequently, supported by references from every continent other than Antarctica and Australia. Ironically, the primary area in which Lander does not engage in comparison is parts of East Asia that did not become China. He treats “East Asia” as a synonym for “subcontinent” but does not mention Japan, Korea, and Vietnam until the last chapter (196–97), and there just to say that they had no particularities worth considering: they adopted “Chinese governance models” that “usually involved increased state control over environments” (197). This is a lost opportunity. For example, Junko Habu's nuanced analysis of subsistence and settlement patterns at excavated Jomon (ca. 14,500–300 BCE) sites vividly envisions a range of uses based on the seasonal availability of resources.2 In contrast, Lander carefully maps contemporaneous Yangshao (ca. 5000–3000 BCE; map 4) sites but acknowledges that he cannot meaningfully differentiate their actual usages (49, 52). Faulting a book that is already ambitiously wide-ranging for not covering even more ground is, of course, a compliment. Lander's willingness to engage with a broad range of scholarship is to be commended. As a specialist in a non-European area in a preindustrial period, this work has much to offer ongoing efforts in “provincializing the Anthropocene.”3The “General Chronology” contains a few oddities: 189 CE is provided as the end of the Han (the death of Emperor Ling) rather than the conventional date of 220 (the forced abdication of the powerless figurehead Emperor Xian). The starting date of the “Mongol (Yuan)” is 1234, the date the Mongols and the Song defeated the Jin, rather than 1271, when the Yuan was founded. The last Qing emperor abdicated in 1912, not 1911. The People's Republic of China—but not the Republic of China—is listed under “Empires.” The imperial nature of the contemporary Chinese state is a contention worth exploring, but this book does not do so. These quibbles aside, the expository portions of The King's Harvest are a model of clarity in explaining formal transitions of power as well as more fundamental shifts, such as creeping gender imbalance. I enthusiastically recommend this volume for premodern China surveys; it will also augment the place of China in seminars on global environmental history

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