Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia Perspectives from Environmental History

About this book

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia critically examines modernization's long-term environmental history. Using local-level studies and the idea of co-production, it suggests new frameworks for understanding as inter-related processes environmental, social, and economic change across China and Japan. The volume opens up new points of comparison and exchange within East Asia and among East Asia, Europe, and North America. Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia adds significant new perspectives to Chinese, Japanese, and global environmental history, as well as world history and development studies.

Contents

Introduction: Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia: Perspectives from Environmental History; James Beattie and Ts'ui-jung Liu

PART I: MODERNIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
1. Agriculture, Population and Environment in Late Imperial China; E. N. Anderson
2. Chinese Migrants and Colonial Development in the British Empire, 1860s-1920s: A Case Study; James Beattie

PART II: WATERSCAPES: DEVELOPMENT, MODERNIZATION AND SOCIETY
3. Dike-based Communities between Water and Sand: The Sand-land Environmental System in Dongchong, South China, 1720s-1980s; Jianxiong Ma
4. Waterscape and Social Transformations in Southern Taiwan: The Damming of Mudan Creek; Shao-hua Liu and Shu-min Huang

PART III: LANDSCAPE COMMODIFICATION
5. The Role of the Shin Nihon Hakkei in Redrawing Japanese Attitudes to Landscape; Thomas Jones
6. The Development of Cinchona Cultivation and 'Kina Gaku' in the Japanese Empire, 1912-45; Ya-wen Ku
7. The Energetics of Militarized Landscapes: The Ecology of War in Henan, 1938-50; Micah S. Muscolino

PART IV: REACTING TO DEVELOPMENT
8. Environmental Non-Government Organizations in China since the 1970s; Sheng Fei
9. Taiwan's Land Use after World War II: An Ecological Modernization Approach; Hsin-Hsun Huang, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, and Shih-Jung Hsu
10. Material Fetters and Spiritual Transcendence: Zhuang Zi and Environmental Thought; Yim-tze Kwong

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Biography

Ts'ui-jung Liu has worked at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, for more than 30 years and was elected an Academician in 1996. She retired in January 2014 and is currently an adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. She has published three monographs and more than 70 articles related to economic history, population history, and environmental history.

James Beattie is Director of the Historical Research Unit at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where he teaches imperial, environmental, garden, and world history. He has published three monographs, co-edited three books, and written over 50 articles and chapters on topics in imperial environmental history, history of science, garden history, and art history. He is Founding Editor of International Review of Environmental History.