This edited volume engages with some of the most dynamic themes in current research on East Asian environmental history, including agricultural science, war and the environment, imperial forestry, oceanic history, and the history of energy. Chapters in this book supply an overview of environmental history as a rapidly expanding field, continuing to generate valuable insights into the mutually constitutive relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment. The book is divided into three parts: Part I consists of three chapters related to land use, while Part II includes five chapters that focus on water, a topic of perennial concern among environmental historians of East Asia, especially as it relates to irrigation, food production, and marine fisheries. Part III consists of two chapters, discussing the impact of new technologies on air quality, in addition to the history of energy in East Asia, which has emerged as an important area of inquiry at the intersection between both environmental history and the history of science and technology. Perspectives on Environmental History in East Asia: Changes in the Land, Water, and Air will appeal to students and scholars of East Asian studies, environmental history, and environmental sciences.

This edited volume engages with some of the most dynamic themes in current research on East Asian environmental history, including agricultural science, war and the environment, imperial forestry, oceanic history, and the history of energy. Chapters in this book supply an overview of environmental history as a rapidly expanding field, continuing to generate valuable insights into the mutually constitutive relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment. The book is divided into three parts: Part I consists of three chapters related to land use, while Part II includes five chapters that focus on water, a topic of perennial concern among environmental historians of East Asia, especially as it relates to irrigation, food production, and marine fisheries. Part III consists of two chapters, discussing the impact of new technologies on air quality, in addition to the history of energy in East Asia, which has emerged as an important area of inquiry at the intersection between both environmental history and the history of science and technology. Perspectives on Environmental History in East Asia: Changes in the Land, Water, and Air will appeal to students and scholars of East Asian studies, environmental history, and environmental sciences.

Covering the years of Japanese invasion during World War II from 1937 to 1945, this essay collection recounts Chinese experiences of living and working under conditions of war. Each of the regimes that ruled a divided China—occupation governments, Chinese Nationalists, and Chinese Communists—demanded and glorified the full commitment of the people and their resources in the prosecution of war. Through stories of both everyday people and mid-level technocrats charged with carrying out the war, this book brings to light the enormous gap between the leadership’s demands and the reality of everyday life. Eight long years of war exposed the unrealistic nature of elite demands for unreserved commitment. As the political leaders faced numerous obstacles in material mobilization and retreated to rhetoric of spiritual resistance, the Chinese populace resorted to localized strategies ranging from stoic adaptation to cynical profiteering, articulated variously with touches of humor and tragedy. These localized strategies are examined through stories of people at varying classes and levels of involvement in living, working, and trying to work through the war under the different regimes. In less than a decade, millions of Chinese were subjects of disciplinary regimes that dictated the celebration of holidays, the films available for viewing, the stories told in tea houses, and the restrictions governing the daily operations and participants of businesses—thus impacting the people of China for years to come. This volume looks at the narratives of those affected by the war and regimes to understand perspectives of both sides of the war and its total outcomes. Living and Working in Wartime China depicts the brutal micromanaging of ordinary lives, devoid of compelling national purposes, that both undercut the regimes’ relationships with their people and helped establish the managerial infrastructure of authoritarian regimes in subsequent postwar years.