Agenda

Ling Zhang (Boston College) - Geoengineering an Empire: The Consumptive Mode of Analysis and China’s Medieval Economic Revolution
Abstract
Geoengineering is deliberate, large-scale intervention of Earth’s geological system by human forces. We tend to associate geoengineering with the modern age, during which we have used technology and machinery to flatten mountains, redirect rivers, extract fossil fuels, and design techno-solutions to combat climate change. I argue that geoengineering is not a modern innovation; rather, it has a lengthy premodern history. To take just one case from China, the imperial state of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) developed colossal projects of land transformation to facilitate its military, financial, and environmental management agendas. As the state became a powerful geological agent, geoengineering served as both a means and an end to the regime’s empire building.
But geoengineering costs. Large-scale land transformations not only led to complex geological and environmental consequences, but also subjugated the imperial state itself. Geoengineering an Empire demanded that the state slavishly create a new political economy in which economic relations of different parts of the empire were reconfigured, natural resources, labor, and wealth were redistributed, and regional differences were widened. From the state’s painstaking service to the altered land, an empire-wide market emerged to drive economic growth. Different from many Chinese historians, who laud the growth of this period as China’s “Medieval Economic Revolution,” I take a more cautious view. I argue that the growth was a regional phenomenon and its success was highly dependent on the state’s political intervention, but that it also derived from tremendous harm inflicted by the state’s geoengineering projects.

Discussant: Dr. Jörg Henning Hüsemann (Leipzig University) 

Short bio
Born and raised in a river town in southeast China, Ling Zhang studied history, philosophy, and literature at Peking University and studied economic and environmental history of medieval north China at University of Cambridge. Before joining Boston College, Ling was a lecturer at Newcastle Univ., a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard Univ. Center for the Environment, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Program of Agrarian Studies at Yale. Ling's research interests include Chinese history, political economy, political ecology, science studies, and environmental studies in general. Ling's first book The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128 (Cambridge U.P., 2016) received the 2017 George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History by the American Society for Environmental History. Ling is currently writing a book entitled "108 Meters: Vertical Ecology and Voluminous Geology in East China." As an associate researcher at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Ling convenes research seminars and conferences for the Center's "Environment in Asia" series. Ling is a Series Co-Editor (with John McNeill) of the "Studies in Environment and History" book series, published by Cambridge U.P..

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Meeting ID: 830 5104 2967
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This event is part of the Environments, Societies, and Histories in East Asia Lecture series, organised by NICHE in collaboration with Maddalena Barenghi, Marco Zappa, Daniele Brombal, Francesca Tarocco and the Department of Asian and North African Studies.