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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire

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

Lander, Brian

Hardcover

Series: Yale Agrarian Studies

Ancient History GeneralChinese HistoryGeneral Political Science

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 030025508X
ISBN13: 9780300255089
Publisher: Yale Univ Pr
Published: Nov 30 2021
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.35
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China's political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data

Over four thousand years of unsustainable growth, Chinese states replaced a diverse ecosystem with a monocropping grain state. All states destroy environments, but only the state can save us. So ancient China's spectres still haunt our modern crisis. A brilliant and disturbing analysis!--Peter C. Perdue, author of Environmental History in China and the West: Its Origins and Prospects

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.

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