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Begin New Search Topic History Political Geography Asia Content Type Commentary and Analysis Publishing Institution The Toynbee Prize Foundation

1. How China’s Environments Changed its Modern History: An interview with Micah Muscolino

Author:
Micah Muscolino and Rustam Khan
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
It is hard to imagine the environmental calamities of our age without invoking China today. The “world’s factory” – as it is colloquially and sometimes derogatively called – has come to forefront of many discussions about the need to avert the dangers of planetary degradation. Images such as the thick carpets of smog covering Beijing or gripping documentaries, such as Death by Design (AMBRICA, 2016) and Plastic China (Jiu-Liang Wang, 2016), have revealed how China’s social and natural landscapes have experienced the ‘Anthropocene’s’ coming of age. In such narratives, the environment in China is usually seen as the victim of unfettered industrial production and global consumption starting with the country’s ‘reform and opening up’ period in the late 1970s. But to what extent does this periodization and the logics of the Anthropocene that rest upon it make sense against the longer historical record? A wave of scholarship has scrutinized the abstract idea of the environment in China’s restless history over the past two centuries. Bracketing the origins of the today’s environmental crises exclusively within the globalization debate is to miss something important. Namely, ecological thinking featured prominently in the country’s experiences with modernization, colonialism, and nation-building starting in the long 19th century. Micah Muscolino’s work is a great example that rethinks the conventional framework of modern Chinese history. Muscolino shows how the making of Qing, National, and PRC rule were often built on its relationships to natural resources. He has also come to see many similarities between today’s environmentalist transformations and China’s past. China stands, as he asserts, at the heart of the world’s present-day predicaments. The Toynbee Prize Foundation had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Micah Muscolino. He is the author of two acclaimed monographs, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (2009) and The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 (2015). With his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Harvard in hand, Muscolino taught at St. Mary’s College of California, Georgetown University, and the University of Oxford, before taking up the Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History at UC San Diego in 2018. He took the time to tell us more about the China’s past and present entanglements with the environment.
Topic:
Environment, Globalization, History, Displacement, Ecology, and Food Crisis
Political Geography:
China and Asia

2. Thinking Through Water: An Interview with Sunil S. Amrith

Author:
Sunil S. Amrith
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
“The history of water,” writes Sunil S. Amrith, “shows that nature has never truly been conquered.” Nature is a dynamic presence in Amrith’s oeuvre. As a historian of South and Southeast Asia, his research engages the spaces, movements, and processes of a uniquely Indian Oceanic region. The worlds recounted by Amrith are often ones marked by the ambitions of empires and polities, the mass migration of human labour, and indeed, the furies of nature itself. In his latest book, Unruly Waters, Amrith shows how “the schemes of empire builders, the visions of freedom fighters, the designs of engineers—and the cumulative, dispersed actions of hundreds of millions of people across generations—have transformed Asia’s waters over the past two hundred years.” It testifies to the dreams that societies have often pinned to water, as well as its unwieldy and turbulent nature. In his account of “the struggle for water” and control over the Asian monsoon, we come to understand how climate change exacerbates a problem both already in-progress and connected to histories of “reckless development and galloping inequality.” Sunil S. Amrith is presently the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian History at Harvard University. He was the 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. From July 2020, Amrith will be the Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. His most recent book publications include: Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History (Basic Books and Penguin UK, 2018), Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011). In this conversation, we discuss the role of water, nature, and inequality vis-à-vis history; the fields of global and environmental history; and lastly, some of the thoughts and practices that underlay the historian’s craft.
Topic:
Globalization, History, Water, and Oceans and Seas
Political Geography:
Asia and Global Focus