The Ecology of the Political Landscape in Eleventh-Century Shaanxi: The Environmental and Spatial History of a Multiethnic Borderland

This talk focuses on the administrative and military geography of the Xi Xia southern frontier and the Song northwest frontier, which was situated immediately south of the Ordos Desert. It was a culturally hybrid, environmentally fragile, and socially complex region roughly 85,000 square kilometers in size at the northwestern periphery of the East Asian Summer Monsoon. On the Chinese side, and to a lesser extent Xi Xia, contesting territorial power and leveraging local and imperial advantage involved constructing and maintaining hundreds of new garrisons and walled settlements. This talk explains how the history of settlement geography on the frontier was related to the history of climate and other environmental factors and how the settlements contributed to environmental change.

Ruth Mostern (University of Pittsburgh) is professor of history, World History Center director and project director of the World Historical  Gazetteer. Her studies of the human past at large spatial and long temporal scales includes methods drawn from environmental- and spatial information science. Her book,  The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press), awarded the 2023 Joseph Levenson Prize, tracks the long human relationship with water and soil, and the ecological transformations, sometimes disastrous, that resulted from human decisions.