Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Of Minds, Morals, And Methods: Combining Moral Meteorology And Disaster Relief In Historiography Of China’S Disaster Management, Wee Kiat Lim

CMP Research

In this working paper, I argue that disaster management in high Qing period can be better understood by simultaneously considering the historiographies of how governing elites understood disasters at the metaphysical level and the administration of disaster relief. During High Qing late imperial China, the regime encountered rapid changes in population, economy, and environment. Following how environmental historian Mark Elvin describes the prevalent ideology that guided Chinese governing elites on implicating human conduct with the manifestation of disasters as “moral meteorology”, I link it to the granary system so as to underscore how these two related but separate streams of …