<i>Coping With Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949</i>. By Jiayan Zhang (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press) 276 pp. $95.00 cloth $32.95 paper

Coping with Calamity explores the causes and outcomes of environmental change in central China’s Hunan Province. Specifically, the text examines the transformative effects that human action had on the Jianghan Plain during the Qing (1644–1919) and Republican (1911–1949) periods. By exploiting an impressive range of local archival sources, Zhang skillfully illustrates how the massive re-engineering of the waterscape that rendered the Plain a critical agricultural region in China ultimately led to a breakdown of its drainage infrastructure. By the late Qing and Republic eras, farmers had creatively adopted strategies to defend against a growing set of ecological threats, but these measures served only to abet the ecological breakdown of the region. The entire set of mutually implicating economic, social, and cultural responses to environmental breakdown impels Zhang to argue, “[T]his demonstrates that environmental factors, more than class relations or market dynamics, defined the agrarian economy of the Jianghan Plain in the Qing and the Republic” (207).The book not only contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of change in China but also offers insights on agro-environmental developments in other cultural contexts. For scholars of China, the text offers an important regional study that illustrates the widely disparate environmental context of different areas in China (for example, the Jianghan Plain versus the North China Plain). Zhang also adds to a corpus of literature that has effectively characterized state control over the agricultural economy as neither pervasive nor entirely absent. This book’s emphasis on the remarkable resilience of farmers in the region impels Zhang to dispute other China scholars’ description of China’s agricultural practices in the late imperial period as largely unsustainable. In any event, Zhang’s analysis challenges any notion of a “hydraulic despotism” in this part of China. In this realm, the book will be of interest to those interested in state–society relations in irrigation societies.A particularly important contribution of Coping with Calamity is the explanatory power of the environmental approach, which sustains an array of economic, social, and cultural responses to environmental conditions—a series of events and responses that is extraordinarily effective in illustrating broad social change. According to Zhang, an environmental approach offers an analytical framework that transcends more standard explanatory paradigms. Explanations of rural change in China relied on theories of class struggle from the 1950s to the 1970s and the market school since the 1980s. Zhang forcefully argues that such paradigmatic approaches simply fail to capture the complex, mutually supporting historical dynamics that cycles of environmental change and peasant response can accommodate. In this respect, his analysis of change in rural China during the late imperial period will indeed be of interest to practitioners of interdisciplinary history.

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