Paper long abstract:

Since John Richard's Unending Frontier (2003) and Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism (2004), the ecological impacts and imperatives of empires have been preoccupied historians of the early modern period. Less widely understood have been the similar ecological impacts and imperatives of the thirteenth century Mongol empire. Environment has been an important area of focus in the study of Central Eurasian nomads, but within a framework that takes the relative stability of the ecological infrastructure as a given. The Mongol empire, however, resulted in a both a vast expansion of pastoralism together with the kind of directed agricultural expansion that we usually associate with the early modern world. The result was an environment in Mongol China that looked vastly different from anything in China before or after - and yet which left permanent marks on the Chinese economy and agriculture. This paper will present research on the environmental geography of Mongol China, showing how distinctive the environment was, and how that distinctiveness was the result of ongoing Mongol imperial policy.