Robert B. Marks - Böcker

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment. Robert B. Marks defines the modern world as one marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, increasing inequality within the wealthiest industrialized countries, and an escape from the environmental constraints of the “biological old regime.” He explains its origins by emphasizing contingencies (such as the conquest of the New World); the broad comparability of the most advanced regions in China, India, and Europe; the reasons why England was able to escape from common ecological constraints facing all of those regions by the end of the eighteenth century; a conjuncture of human and natural forces that solidified a gap between the industrialized and non-industrialized parts of the world; the mounting environmental crisis that defines the modern world; and the ways in which the forces of globalization stress the economic and political underpinnings of the modern world. Now in a new edition that brings the saga of the modern world to the present in an environmental context, the book considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the twentieth century and became the sole superpower by the twenty-first century, and why the changed relationship of humans to the environmental likely will be the hallmark of the modern era—the Anthropocene. Once again arguing that the US rise to global hegemon was contingent, not inevitable, Marks also points to the resurgence of Asia and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment that may in the long run overshadow any political and economic milestones of the past hundred years.

Robert B. Marks skildrar i denna lättillgängliga och fängslande bok den moderna världens ursprung i globalt perspektiv. Till skillnad från de flesta andra böcker i ämnet, som förutsätter att den moderna världens tillblivelse handlar om "västerlandets uppgång", stödjer denna sig på ny kunskap och tilldelar Asien, Afrika och Nya världen viktiga roller i berättelsen. Enligt Marks präglas den moderna världen av industrin, nationalstaten, mellanstatlig krigföring, en vid och växande klyfta mellan världens rikaste och fattigaste delar samt befrielsen från "den biologiska gamla regimen". Han förklarar dess ursprung genom att betona tillfälligheter (som erövringen av Nya världen); den stora jämförbarheten mellan de mest utvecklade områdena i Kina, Indien och Europa; skälen till att England kunde frigöra sig från de ekologiska begränsningar som hämmade alla de områdena på 1700-talet; och den förening av mänskliga ansträngningar och naturkrafter som befäste klyftan mellan världens industrialiserade och icke-industrialiserade delar.

Ten millennia in the Mono Lake Basin, showing how this complex ecosystem came to be what it is today.  Nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California sits a stunning landscape overlooking a saline lake with picturesque tufa towers and flocks of phalarope birds. This is the Mono Lake Basin. In this sweeping history, Robert B. Marks examines the forces that have shaped the Mono Lake Basin's rich ecosystem. The story starts with the region's Indigenous peoples. It then traces the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of Euro-American settlers and the dispossession of the Kootzaduka’a people of their land. A struggle for control over water led to hydroelectric development and the sale of land and water rights to Los Angeles, diverting nearly all fresh water out of the basin and precipitating an ecological crisis by the 1970s. The ecological restoration movement has, for now, successfully preserved the Mono Lake Basin. As Marks shows, the basin reveals a larger story of how human actions and natural forces shape the environment. A dramatic and ultimately hopeful environmental history, Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin explores a beloved region to illuminate questions of water, power, and our relationship with the natural world that echo far beyond the American West.

This volume illuminates the relationship of China's radical past to its reformist present as China makes a way forward through very differently conceived and contested visions of the future. In the context of early twenty-first century problems and the failures of global capitalism, is China's history of revolutionary socialism an aberration that is soon to be forgotten, or can it serve as a resource for creating a more fully human and radically democratic China with implications for all of us? Ranging from the early years of China's revolutionary twentieth-century to the present, the essays collected here look at the past and present of China with a view toward better understanding the ideas, ideals, and people who have dared to imagine radical transformation of their worlds and to assess the conceptual, political, and social limitations of these visions and their implementations. The volume's chapters focus on these issues from a range of vantage points, representing a spectrum of current scholarship. The first half of the book brings new insights to understanding how early-twentieth century intellectuals interpreted ideas that allowed them to break with China's past and to envision new paths to a modern future. It treats of Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Communist party, Mao Zedong, and Mao in relation to the non-Communist Liang Shuming and with the Dalai Lama. With continuing threads of nation and nationalities, of peasants, utopias and dystopias linking the chapters, the book's second half looks broadly at the consequences of the implementations of radical ideas, at the same time critiquing our accepted frameworks of analysis. Moving up to the present, the book investigates the effects of the reforms since the 1980s on long-term environmental degradation and on the emergence of a capitalist rural economy. It gives an unsparing view into contemporary rural China through independent films. The book concludes with an analysis of the unshakable persistence of the shibboleth, "the rise of China," in popul

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment. Tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind, Robert B. Marks illuminates the paradoxes inherent in China’s environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China’s traditional “heroic” storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature and contacts with other peoples that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any student interested in China, past or present, or indeed in the world’s environmental future.

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment. Tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind, Robert B. Marks illuminates the paradoxes inherent in China’s environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China’s traditional “heroic” storyline, highlighting the marginalization of nature and contacts with other peoples that followed the spread of Chinese civilization while examining the development of a distinctly Chinese way of relating to and altering the environment. Unmatched in his ability to synthesize a complex subject clearly and cogently, Marks has written an accessible yet nuanced history for any student interested in China, past or present, or indeed in the world’s environmental future.

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment. Robert B. Marks defines the modern world as one marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, increasing inequality within the wealthiest industrialized countries, and an escape from the environmental constraints of the “biological old regime.” He explains its origins by emphasizing contingencies (such as the conquest of the New World); the broad comparability of the most advanced regions in China, India, and Europe; the reasons why England was able to escape from common ecological constraints facing all of those regions by the end of the eighteenth century; a conjuncture of human and natural forces that solidified a gap between the industrialized and non-industrialized parts of the world; the mounting environmental crisis that defines the modern world; and the ways in which the forces of globalization stress the economic and political underpinnings of the modern world. Now in a new edition that brings the saga of the modern world to the present in an environmental context, the book considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the twentieth century and became the sole superpower by the twenty-first century, and why the changed relationship of humans to the environmental likely will be the hallmark of the modern era—the Anthropocene. Once again arguing that the US rise to global hegemon was contingent, not inevitable, Marks also points to the resurgence of Asia and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment that may in the long run overshadow any political and economic milestones of the past hundred years.