New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton UP, 2023) provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule.
The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and world economies buckled. Timothy Brook draws on the history of grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous years of a once-great dynasty. He explores how global trade networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid grain shortages and famine. By the early 1640s, as the subjects of the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime.
A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between an empire and the climate that turned against it.
Huijun Mai is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024)
Elena Kochetkova, "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024)
Data Streams
Heather White, "60 Days to a Greener Life: Ease Eco-Anxiety Through Joyful Daily Action" (Harper Horizon, 2024)
Tad Delay, "Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change" (Verso, 2024)
Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Sunaura Taylor, "Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert" (U California Press, 2024)
Sarah Cassella, "Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics" (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023)
The Climate Crisis as a Problem of Collective Action: A Discussion with Dana Fisher
At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans
Ban Wang, "At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China" (Duke UP, 2022)
"Orion" Magazine: A Discussion with Sumanth Prabhaker
Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Inhuman
Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)
Dan Chapman, "A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land" (Island Press, 2022)
MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair
Salar Mameni, "Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2023)
Michael Gilson, "Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
John J. Berger, "Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth" (Seven Stories Press, 2023)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies