Rather than a monolithic system, agriculture encompassed diverse practices, infrastructures, and local adaptations across its vast and varied landscapes. Through the interplay between water, land, and crops, this webinar panel examines agricultural production in China’s core and peripheries, as well as the underlying environmental conditions, resource management strategies, and economic imperatives. Wang explores the Lower Yangzi Delta, a “world of water,” and unravels how rural communities sustained their water resources through self-organized hydraulic institutions and under minimal state intervention. Peng turns to the mountainous highlands of Southeast China, where ramie cultivation not only transformed local agriculture but also connected the region to expanding domestic and global textile markets. Gao shifts the focus to Qing Xinjiang’s arid frontier, investigating how karez irrigation shaped property rights, agrarian practices, and imperial governance in Turpan. Together, these studies reveal how regional ecologies, infrastructures, and communities influenced agricultural development, offering new insights into China’s environmental and agrarian history.
王悠 Wáng Yōu: Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her current book project, Collaboration amidst Conflict: Rural Communities and the Making of a Sustainable Waterscape in the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1500-1850, examines everyday human-environment interactions in China’s economic and cultural center through hydraulic institutions, agricultural knowledge production, and gendered labor regimes. She will begin her new role as Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Georgetown University this August.
彭依芸 Yiyun Peng: Assistant professor of History and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She works on the history of science and technology, environmental history, and economic history in late imperial and modern China. Her current book project, A Herbaceous Revolution: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970, explores how the production of crop-based commodities—indigo dye, ramie (fiber plant) cloth, tobacco, and bamboo paper—in upland Southeast China sparked a prolonged transformation of the region’s environment, economy, and society.
高原 Yuan Gao: A postdoc associate at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale and the incoming Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Case Western Reserve University. She is an environmental historian of northwestern China and Central Eurasia. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Tigers and Locusts: State Governance and Environmental Changes in Qing China’s Arid Land, which studies the social and environmental history of rural societies in late Qing Xinjiang.
Frank Zelko, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Rather than a monolithic system, agriculture encompassed diverse practices, infrastructures, and local adaptations across its vast and varied landscapes. Through the interplay between water, land, and crops, this webinar panel examines agricultural production in China’s core and peripheries, as well as the underlying environmental conditions, resource management strategies, and economic imperatives. Wang explores the Lower Yangzi Delta, a “world of water,” and unravels how rural communities sustained their water resources through self-organized hydraulic institutions and under minimal state intervention. Peng turns to the mountainous highlands of Southeast China, where ramie cultivation not only transformed local agriculture but also connected the region to expanding domestic and global textile markets. Gao shifts the focus to Qing Xinjiang’s arid frontier, investigating how karez irrigation shaped property rights, agrarian practices, and imperial governance in Turpan. Together, these studies reveal how regional ecologies, infrastructures, and communities influenced agricultural development, offering new insights into China’s environmental and agrarian history.
王悠 Wáng Yōu: Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her current book project, Collaboration amidst Conflict: Rural Communities and the Making of a Sustainable Waterscape in the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1500-1850, examines everyday human-environment interactions in China’s economic and cultural center through hydraulic institutions, agricultural knowledge production, and gendered labor regimes. She will begin her new role as Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Georgetown University this August.
彭依芸 Yiyun Peng: Assistant professor of History and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She works on the history of science and technology, environmental history, and economic history in late imperial and modern China. Her current book project, A Herbaceous Revolution: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970, explores how the production of crop-based commodities—indigo dye, ramie (fiber plant) cloth, tobacco, and bamboo paper—in upland Southeast China sparked a prolonged transformation of the region’s environment, economy, and society.
高原 Yuan Gao: A postdoc associate at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale and the incoming Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Case Western Reserve University. She is an environmental historian of northwestern China and Central Eurasia. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Tigers and Locusts: State Governance and Environmental Changes in Qing China’s Arid Land, which studies the social and environmental history of rural societies in late Qing Xinjiang.
Frank Zelko, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
