The past decade has witnessed a burst of scholarly interest in the environmental history of Manchuria. Amid a dizzying volume of recent books, articles, dissertations, and panels, Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria, based on a workshop held at the University of British Columbia in 2013, stands apart for offering the most comprehensive entrée into a quickly growing subfield. The collected essays by Diana Lary, David A. Bello, Loretta E. Kim, Blaine Chiasson, Norman Smith, Annika A. Culver, Kathryn Meyer, Ronald Suleski, Wang Ning, and Sun Xiaoping describe the history of Manchuria from the early Qing to the Cultural Revolution, drawing from a wide range of sources: unpublished court records, oral histories, graphic art, photography, policy papers, memoirs, and studies of animal and wetland ecology. It is a must-read for historians of East Asia's environmental history. Scholars of the Qing, Japanese, and PRC states, too, will find provocative arguments about how each polity shaped, and was ultimately shaped by, the “rewards and challenges” embodied in Manchuria's natural environment (p. 11).

While sensitive to important differences between regimes and eras, the volume also emphasizes overlooked continuities. Throughout the modern era, for example, state actors tended to portray Manchuria as distinct from the metropolitan core: its climate was harsher, its resources more abundant, and its landscape more “empty” (p. 4). Colonizers had to adapt. To survive the cold, some adopted local clothing and furniture, such as furs and kang beds; others engineered technical solutions; and still others urged colonists to endure through hard labor. To extract resources from the land, colonizing states had to adapt as well. New institutions came into being, such as the fur-tribute of the Qing and the agricultural colonies and experimental farms of the twentieth century. Yet the plenty of Manchuria often proved elusive or cursed. Next to propaganda about agrarian bounty, we thus read of starving hunters, urban slums, land appropriations, degraded ecosystems, militarized labor camps, and—most chillingly—an account of mass suicide in 1945.

To encourage readers to explore the historical continuities and ruptures across national and periodic boundaries, each essay provides in-text references to other chapters in the book. True to the field's emphasis on resource management, modernity, and the state, Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria contains little on Manchuria before the seventeenth century or on climate change, though one chapter notes the importance of annual shifts in winter conditions for procuring furs. Nonetheless, the volume's sweeping, boundary-crossing study of environment and state over the past four centuries ensures that it should remain a vital touchstone in Manchurian history for years to come.