Brian Lander's "The King's Harvest"

Brian Lander is assistant professor of history at Brown University and a fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The King’s Harvest covers several of the key themes of the book. The main argument of the book is that the growth of more powerful political systems increased the ability of human societies to transform their environments, particularly by transforming natural ecosystems into agricultural ones. The page begins in the middle of a paragraph which argues that the Western Zhou (pronounced “Joe”; 1046-771 BCE) political system was highly decentralized: the king did not receive tribute from the lords who were officially his subordinates, but instead was expected to give them gifts. It was more an alliance of economically independent city states than a centralized kingdom. The Zhou kings only really controlled their own family estates and had no power to decide how most land was exploited. I emphasize this to make clear that the subsequent development of bureaucratic governance, a key theme of the rest of the book, vastly increased the ability of governments to transform environments. The final paragraph of page 99 does argue, however, that just by maintaining peace for almost three centuries the Western Zhou created the perfect conditions for agricultural societies to expand at the expense of wildlife.

A central theme of the book is the relationships between humans and domesticated plants and animals, and this is demonstrated in the second paragraph, which concerns horses. Horses were the tanks and sports cars of the ancient world. They gave their wealthy owners substantial power over commoners and were also beautiful things that became powerful symbols of masculinity. And they move fast, increasing the space that states could administer. The state of Qin, which founded China’s first empire, and is the topic of the two final chapters of the book, began as a horse-breeding fief of the Western Zhou kings.

The next paragraph discusses hunting parks. The book begins thousands of years ago at the dawn of agriculture, when the valleys of the central Yellow River valley were home to a great diversity of wildlife. By the time the book ends around 200 BCE those valleys were full of farms and livestock, leaving little space for deer and other animals. Rulers who liked hunting increasingly had to set land aside to preserve wildlife. As in many other times and places, people’s love of hunting wild animals has been one of the main forces pushing them to preserve them.

Since the book is arranged chronologically, page 99 only covers one time period, but it gives readers a taste of the main themes of the book.

Learn more about The King's Harvest at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue