3 - “Agiriculture Is the Foundation”: Economic Recovery and Development of Lingnan During the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644

Summary

If the first two chapters skimmed the surface of more than a thousand years of Chinese history, in the remainder of the book the pace will slow down to allow a more detailed examination of the environmental and economic history of Lingnan during the four and a half centuries from 1400 to 1850, a period usually glossed by historians as “late imperial China.” In this chapter we will see that in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Han Chinese aggressively occupied lands in Guangxi and in the southwestern littoral previously held by non-Chinese, bringing those lands under not only Chinese suzerainty but Chinese plows as well. Moreover, commercial development especially was becoming one of the primary engines of ecological change: agricultural exports represented energy drains that had to be replaced by imports of energy from outside the ecosystem — in particular, food for the human population. The commercialization that began to fuel economic growth from the middle of the sixteenth century on, though, was cut short by the disasters attending the mid-seventeenth-century Manchu wars of conquest, thereby also attenuating the anthropogenic processes of ecological change until more peaceful conditions returned in the late 1600s. Nonetheless, the Ming pattern of economic development began pointing toward greater deforestation, large-scale extinction of other species, significant reduction of biodiversity, and the creation of a single Lingnan agroecosystem.