Event

For much of the twentieth century, Chinese governments pursued two distinct forms of developmentalism. A “globalist” paradigm emphasized machine technologies, fossil fuels, technocratic knowledge, and capital mobilization, while an “involutionary” approach depended on low-tech, labor-intensive, and cost-minimizing strategies. Both imposed a very high environmental cost, and neither reckoned with the importance of non-human actors such as minerals, soil, water, animals, and microbes. This lecture will explore the dilemmas of development in the early 20th century using the Hanyeping coal and iron mines （汉冶萍公司）as a case study. I will describe how rocks and bugs impeded the state’s pursuit of globalist development in the Hanyeping venture, causing an array of political and diplomatic problems for the late imperial and early Republican regimes. At a methodological level, I will explain why scholars need to take seriously the agency of these kinds of non-human Others even when exploring subjects outside of environmental history.

Stephen R. Halsey’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of state power, economic development, and environmental change in late imperial and modern China. He completed his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and currently serves as an associate professor of history at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. He published his first book, Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft with Harvard University Press in 2015 and is currently completing a second book manuscript entitled Prometheus Bound: Environmental Crisis and the Developmental State in Modern China.