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Description
THE RETREAT OF THE ELEPHANTS: An Environmental History of China. By MARK ELVIN. xxviii and 564 pp.; maps, diagrs., bibliog., index. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0300101112; $22.00 (paper), ISBN 9780300119930.
The Retreat of the Elephants is a grand narrative of three thousand years of environmental and social decline from an apparent ecological golden age--a time when elephants roamed across what would become China proper, free of serious depredation by their prehistoric hominid neighbors, who had yet to be infected with the deadly tendencies of "civilization." The book is vast in scope, and Mark Elvin develops a compelling synthesis from often contradictory strands to make the point that, despite the vast, voluminous, and often inspiringly poetic treatment of "nature" in the Chinese literary and historical record, state formation was followed by the steadily intensifying drumbeat of interregional political competition, economic growth, agricultural expansion and intensification, and massive but unsustainable hydrological engineering projects. These, the metabolic requirements of Chinese civilization, led inexorably to the demise of much, or even most, of China's original environmental wealth and placed the peasantry in increasingly impoverished and tenuous living conditions by the late imperial era, where the book stops. At that juncture, the author contends--as he has in previous works--human and natural resources were stretched so thin that no capital was available for the technical and institutional innovations necessary to drive additional economic development; China was trapped on a treadmill of diminishing returns while Europe and North America initiated the industrial revolution. In the author's words, "The retreat of the elephants maps in reverse, both in space and time, the growth of the Chinese farm economy.... [T]he space dominated by elephants... |
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