Abstract
This chapter examines the environmental impacts of overseas Chinese as a means of developing trans-national Chinese environmental history.1 In particular, it underlines the importance of Pacific hinterlands in shaping the environmental history of China’s Guangdong Province, and adds to broader understandings of regional differences within Chinese environmental history.
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Notes
For English-language works, see Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006);
Mark Elvin and Ts’ui-jung Liu, eds, Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, & Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Ts’ui-jung Liu, ed., Environmental History in East Asia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2014).
Exceptions include: James Beattie, ‘Empire of the Rhododendron: Re-orienting New Zealand Garden History’, in Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, 2nd edn. (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013), 241–57, 365–7; and ‘Eco-cultural Networks in Southern China and Colonial New Zealand, 1860s–1910s’, in Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History, ed. James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 151–9;
Fei Sheng, ‘Environmental Experiences of Chinese People in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Australian Gold Rush’, Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences, 7–8 (2012): 99–127;
James Beattie and Duncan M. Campbell, Lan Yuan 蘭園 : A Garden of Distant Longing (Dunedin: Shanghai Museum Press and Dunedin Chinese Gardens Trust, 2013).
Corey Ross, ‘The Tin Frontier: Mining, Empire, and Environment in Southeast Asia, 1870s–1930s’, Environmental History, 19 (2014): 454–79;
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005).
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
See Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, eds., Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2002);
David Young, Our Islands, Ourselves: A History of Conservation in New Zealand (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2004);
Peter Holland, Home in the Howling Wilderness: Settlers and the Environment in Southern New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013);
Paul Star, ‘New Zealand’s Biota Barons: Ecological Transformation in Colonial New Zealand’, ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand, 6 (2011): 1–12.
Jim McAloon, ‘Resource Frontiers, Settler Capitalism and Environmental Change 1770–1860’, in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Pawson and Brooking, 1st edn., 52–68; C. J. Elder and M. F. Green, ‘New Zealand and China’, in New Zealand and China, ed. Ann Trotter (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1986), 16–63.
William Tai Yuen, The Origins of China’s Awareness of New Zealand, 1674–1911 (Auckland: New Zealand Asia Institute, The University of Auckland, 2005), 93–109;
Ian Smith, The New Zealand Sealing Industry (Wellington: Department of Conservation, 2002).
Richard Boast, Buying the Land, Selling the Land: Governments and Ma¯ori Land in the North Island (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2008);
David V. Williams, ‘Te kooti tango whenua’: The Native Land Court 1864–1909 (Wellington: Huia, 1999); McAloon, ‘Resource frontiers’;
James Beattie, ‘Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: Indian/New Zealand Biological and Landscape Connections, 1830s–1890s’, in East India Companies and the Natural World 1600–1850, ed. Vinita Damoradaran and Anna Winterbottom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 219–48;
Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, vol. 1: How the Cantonese Goldseekers and their Heirs Settled in New Zealand (Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1993).
Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2.
Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, 1: 11. On migrant networks in a broader context, see Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–1936, 2nd edn. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and ‘Conceptualising Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949’, in The Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific, ed. Anthony Reid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–32.
This is reproduced fully in James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, vol. 4: Don’s ‘Roll of Chinese’ (Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1993).
James Ng, ‘The Sojourner Experience’, in Unfolding History, Evolving Identity, ed. Manying Ip (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 14.
Neville Ritchie, ‘Archaeology and History of the Chinese in Southern New Zealand during the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Acculturation, Adaptation and Change’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Otago, 1986), 53–6.
On Chinese miners in Australia, see: Sheng, ‘Environmental Experiences’, 115–19; Michael MacLellan Tracey, ‘No Water — No Gold — Applied Hydrology in Nineteenth Century Gold Mining’, in The Australian Historical Mining Association—Conference Proceedings 1996, ed. Ruth Kerr and Michael MacLellan Tracey (Canberra: Home Planet Design and Publishing, 1996?), available at: http://www.heritagearchaeology.com.au/water.htm, accessed 21 February 2014.
Randall Rohe, ‘Mining’s Impact on the Land’, in Green Versus Gold: Sources in Californian Environmental History, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), 125–35.
Otago holds the record for the coldest and hottest temperatures recorded in New Zealand. On its climate extremes, see Julian Kuzma, ‘The 1895 Snowstorm’, ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand, 9, no. 1 (2014): 79–103; James Beattie et al., eds, Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Marc Schallenberg and David Kelly, Ecological Condition of Six Shallow Southland Lakes, Report No. 2198 (Nelson: Cawthron Institute, 2012), 1.
Ole Bruun, ‘The Fengshui Resurgence in China: Conflicting Cosmologies Between State and Peasantry’, China Journal 36 (1996): 48.
In response to agitation from increasing numbers of land-hungry settlers, a key manifesto of the Liberal Government (1891–1912) involved land redistribution, the breaking up of the larger estates for closer settlement. Tom Brooking, Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand: A Biography of John McKenzie (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1996).
Hearn, ‘Mining the Quarry’, 109–10, 117; Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies, ‘The Sludge Question: The Regulation of Mine Tailings in Nineteenth-Century Victoria’, Environment and History, 20 (2014): 385–410.
See, Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, 1: 315–20; Terry Hearn and Ray Hargreaves, The Speculator’s Dream: Gold Dredging in Southern New Zealand (Dunedin: Allied Press, 1985), 12. Ritchie, ‘Archaeology and History of the Chinese’, 59.
Note, for example: Keith Scott, Naseby: A History. To Everything There Is a Season (Christchurch: Naseby Vision Inc., 2012), 88–90.
Ritchie, ‘Archaeology and History’; A. Piper, ‘Chinese Diet and Cultural Conservatism in Nineteenth-century Southern New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, 6 (1988): 34–42.
Alexander Don, Under Six Flags: Being Notes on Chinese in Samoa, Hawaii, United States, British Columbia, Japan and China (Dunedin: J. Wilkie & Co., 1898), 91–2.
Most studies of the Chinese diaspora examine self-help societies and political organizations, as well as business and migration networks, and issues of identity formation and racism rather than environmental connections. McKeown, Melancholy Order; Keir Reeves, ‘Tracking the Dragon Down Under: Chinese Cultural Connections in Gold Rush Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand’, Graduate Journal of Asia–Pacific Studies, 5 (2005): 41–66.
Judd Kinzley, ‘Turning Prospectors into Settlers: Gold, Immigrant Miners and the Settlement of the Frontier in Late Qing Xinjiang’, in China on the Margins, ed. Sherman Cochran and Paul G. Pickowicz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Series, 2010), 17–41.
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Beattie, J. (2016). A Case Study of Chinese Migration and Colonial Development in the British Empire, 1860s–1920s. In: Liu, Tj., Beattie, J. (eds) Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57231-8_3
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