The State and the Environmental History of Early China: Interview with Professor Brian Lander

Tides of History

The environment of China has been so thoroughly shaped by human activity that it's difficult to imagine it as a wild landscape, as it was at the end of the last Ice Age. Since then, first agriculture and then the state have altered it, replacing native flora and fauna on an enormous scale. Professor Brian Lander, author of The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First States, joins me to discuss those two linked topics.

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