Still waiting for "Eels" in the mail, so we move on to Elvin's "The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China"
A bit older, but looking forward to this synthetic account to go with the history of the Yellow River I read last year and a history of the Yangtze also on the syllabus
Having learned about the Rhine and Columbia, Scott now directs us to 'Non-Homo Sapiens Vital Interests," starting with Anders Halverson's "An Entirely Synthetic Fish" about the proliferation of the rainbow trout from a Pacific Rim species to one of the most-stocked fish in the world
And here we get the meaning of the book's name. Four thousand years ago, elephants lived as far northeast as Beijing in China
However, over the course of four millennia of Han Chinese expansion and settlement, elephants are now only extant near the country's border with Burma
This is mindblowing. Due to deforestation and sedimentation upstream, between 1194 & 1855 the mouth of the Yellow River advanced 90 *kilometers* into the sea
Much of the land at the mouth of the Yangtze was created by the same process, with the land Shanghai is on today not existing until the 1200s
Wow. Just found out folks in Sichuan were using and transporting natural gas via bamboo pipeline like a thousand years ago. This passage is from the Ming era, photo from much later obviously.
Most people don't realize how *modern* cholera is. It is endemic to India, and it's global spread was only made possible by the connections and devastation wrought by imperialism. The first pandemic wasn't until 1817. Didn't hit Europe til the 1830s. John Snow was confronting a fairly novel disease.
Pan Jixun, a genuine earth-mover? In the late 1500s, Pan revised Chinese river management that called for dividing rivers into many channels, instead constructing massive works that unified the Yellow River into a single channel that pushed sediment out to the sea, growing its delta by 1.54 km/year
Over two centuries before Tulla's correction of the Rhine, Pan remade the Yellow River, creating many of the same advantages and the same problems that would harry human efforts at river control
So true. There's a rather scandalous error in lots of modern scholarship on premodern Arabic & Persian-speaking areas, where "waba/veba" is translated as "cholera." It's historically indefensible. It just means "epidemic", nothing more. Neat study here: www.academia.edu/102631694. #histmed
