IMC 2021: Sessions

Geoengineering is deliberate, large-scale intervention of Earth's geological system by human forces. We tend to associate geoengineering with the modern age, during which we have used technology and machinery to flatten mountains, redirect rivers, extract fossil fuels, and design techno-solutions to combat climate change. I argue that geoengineering is not a modern innovation; rather, it has a lengthy premodern history. To take just one case from China, the imperial state of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) developed colossal projects of land transformation to facilitate its military, financial, and environmental management agendas. As the state became a powerful geological agent, geoengineering served as both a means and an end to the regime's empire building.

But geoengineering costs. Large-scale land transformations not only led to complex geological and environmental consequences, but also subjugated the imperial state itself. Geoengineering demanded that the state slavishly create a new political economy in which economic relations of different parts of the empire were reconfigured, natural resources, labor, and wealth were redistributed, and regional differences were widened. From the state's painstaking service to the altered land, an empire-wide market emerged to drive economic growth. Different from many Chinese historians, who laud the growth of this period as China's 'Medieval Economic Revolution', I take a more cautious view. I argue that the growth was a regional phenomenon and its success was highly dependent on the state's political intervention but that it also derived from tremendous harm inflicted by the state's geoengineering projects.