The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire

Abstract

Brian Lander defines his project as “the first English-language monograph on the environmental history of early China” (11). Lander tells the story of people in early China transforming the environment through the combination of technology and social organization, culminating in a centralized bureaucratic empire. Natural ecosystems were replaced with artificial ones, which were amenable to the extraction of energy by humans in general and state rulers in particular.The book's dual focus is on agriculture and the state. The opening chapter provides a theoretical introduction to the nature of political power. According to Lander, it is embedded in the production and extraction of surplus, intensified through violent competition among the states. The rest of the book traces the interplay between agricultural expansion and political power from the origins of agricultural food production in China circa 6000 BCE to the foundation of the empire in 221 BCE. Lander shows how domestication of animals and plants, especially grain crops, generated taxable surpluses available for appropriation by the states that, in turn, encouraged people to replace the surviving natural ecosystems with agricultural ones. Interstate competition incentivized states “to increase productivity for increased military power” and consequently scaled up the environmental imprint of human societies (203). This is why the aptly named Warring States period (453–221 BCE) was a time of extraordinary technological (e.g., iron metallurgy) and organizational innovation (e.g., bureaucratic government), contributing to the expansion of agricultural ecosystems.Lander's narrative is organized both chronologically and thematically. As a result, some historical periods are addressed in more than one chapter in varying contexts. Chapter 2 primarily focuses on the formation of complex societies during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age (ca. 8000–1000 BCE). This is the most “environmental” chapter of all. The author summarizes archaeological data on vegetation and wild fauna of northern China, the domestication process, human diet, health conditions, and impact on ecosystems.The following chapters are more focused on the state. Chapter 3 deals with the rise of political organization in China from the late third to the mid-first millennium BCE and shows how the increasingly powerful states expanded “the productivity, and thus the environmental impact, of human societies” (75). Chapter 4 focuses on the state of Qin, which, between the eighth and the third century BCE, grew from a humble regional polity in northwestern China to the unifier of the known world. Chapter 5 discusses the political economy and ecological impact of the Qin Empire in the third century BCE. Chapter 6 addresses the Qin Empire's legacy for the human-environment relationships in imperial China and argues that empires contributed to expanding agricultural ecosystems by establishing peace and providing physical and institutional infrastructures.The book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the human impact on the environment in ancient East Asia. Its excellent readability and Lander's readiness to venture beyond early China studies to engage a broad range of topics makes it interesting to a broad audience. These topics include the ecological foundations of political power and the detrimental effects of interstate competition on the environment.Ambitious projects such as The King's Harvest often expose themselves to criticism by specialists in the relevant research fields. Students of Chinese history may wonder if one can write an “environmental history of early China” based on the evidence from a relatively small region of Guanzhong (in the present-day Shaanxi Province of China). Lander's occasional overreliance on normative texts such as legal statutes would probably unsettle some archaeologists and environmental historians. Parts of the book—for example, chapter 5—are about institutions and state economy rather than environment and subsistence. Economic historians can be excused for frowning upon Lander's superficial treatment of markets as a driver of economic and environmental change. It has been ten years since Robert Marks's China: Its Environment and History (2012) identified markets as one of the three social structures, along with centralized states and farming households, by which the Chinese transformed their environment.Yet this criticism highlights rather than belittles the book's strengths. By focusing on the best-documented and historically significant region, paying attention to the actors’ ideologies and motivations, and highlighting the states as a central force in environmental history, Lander drives home the book's key message. Humans have successfully created political structures that destroy natural ecosystems, and they may also be able to create ones that restore and preserve them.