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Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s looks at the transnational routes for the development of science and technology in the first pivotal decades of modern China.

Winner of the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology 2023. In John Fryer and The Translator's Vade-mecum, Tola offers for the first time a comprehensive study of the collection of scientific and technical glossaries, with English-Chinese parallel translation, compiled by the English scholar John Fryer (1839-1928).

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become \"yellow\" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed in human history. Railroads linked remote hinterlands with cities; overland and undersea cables connected distant continents. New and accessible print technologies made the wide dissemination of ideas possible; oceangoing steamers carried goods to faraway markets and enabled the greatest long-distance migrations in recorded history. In this volume, leading scholars of the Islamic world recount the enduring consequences these technological, economic, social, and cultural revolutions had on Muslim communities from North Africa to South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and China. Drawing on a multiplicity of approaches and genres, from commodity history to biography to social network theory, the essays in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print offer new and diverse perspectives on a transnational community in an era of global transformation.

Wetlands have long been drained for human use, thereby strongly affecting greenhouse gas fluxes, flood control, nutrient cycling and biodiversity. Nevertheless, the global extent of natural wetland loss remains remarkably uncertain. Here, we reconstruct the spatial distribution and timing of wetland loss through conversion to seven human land uses between 1700 and 2020, by combining national and subnational records of drainage and conversion with land-use maps and simulated wetland extents. We estimate that 3.4 million km2 (confidence interval 2.9–3.8) of inland wetlands have been lost since 1700, primarily for conversion to croplands. This net loss of 21% (confidence interval 16–23%) of global wetland area is lower than that suggested previously by extrapolations of data disproportionately from high-loss regions. Wetland loss has been concentrated in Europe, the United States and China, and rapidly expanded during the mid-twentieth century. Our reconstruction elucidates the timing and land-use drivers of global wetland losses, providing an improved historical baseline to guide assessment of wetland loss impact on Earth system processes, conservation planning to protect remaining wetlands and prioritization of sites for wetland restoration.

A very large set of proxy data is used to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries, to benchmark climate model simulations of hydroclimate; the twentieth-century intensification of hydroclimate extremes seen in the model simulations is not supported by the proxy reconstruction. Twelve centuries of hydroclimate variation Future change in hydroclimate could be one of the more societally disruptive forms of climate change, but hemispheric variations in past hydroclimate are largely unknown, especially outside of tree-ring-based reconstructions. Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist and colleagues now assemble a suite of records — including tree rings, ice cores, peat, speleothems, lake and marine sediments, and documentary evidence — to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability during the past twelve centuries. The ninth, tenth, eleventh and twentieth centuries were comparatively wet, while conditions were drier from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries. The reconstruction generally agrees with model simulations, until the twentieth century, when models simulate a much higher frequency of both dry and wet extremes than is seen in the data. The comparison suggests that models may be missing important processes, and that projections of changes in hydroclimatic conditions remain uncertain. Accurate modelling and prediction of the local to continental-scale hydroclimate response to global warming is essential given the strong impact of hydroclimate on ecosystem functioning, crop yields, water resources, and economic security 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . However, uncertainty in hydroclimate projections remains large 5 , 6 , 7 , in part due to the short length of instrumental measurements available with which to assess climate models. Here we present a spatial reconstruction of hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries across the Northern Hemisphere derived from a network of 196 at least millennium-long proxy records. We use this reconstruction to place recent hydrological changes 8 , 9 and future precipitation scenarios 7 , 10 , 11 in a long-term context of spatially resolved and temporally persistent hydroclimate patterns. We find a larger percentage of land area with relatively wetter conditions in the ninth to eleventh and the twentieth centuries, whereas drier conditions are more widespread between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Our reconstruction reveals that prominent seesaw patterns of alternating moisture regimes observed in instrumental data 12 , 13 , 14 across the Mediterranean, western USA, and China have operated consistently over the past twelve centuries. Using an updated compilation of 128 temperature proxy records 15 , we assess the relationship between the reconstructed centennial-scale Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate and temperature variability. Even though dry and wet conditions occurred over extensive areas under both warm and cold climate regimes, a statistically significant co-variability of hydroclimate and temperature is evident for particular regions. We compare the reconstructed hydroclimate anomalies with coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model simulations and find reasonable agreement during pre-industrial times. However, the intensification of the twentieth-century-mean hydroclimate anomalies in the simulations, as compared to previous centuries, is not supported by our new multi-proxy reconstruction. This finding suggests that much work remains before we can model hydroclimate variability accurately, and highlights the importance of using palaeoclimate data to place recent and predicted hydroclimate changes in a millennium-long context 16 , 17 .

Critical transitions in experimental and theoretical systems can be anticipated on the basis of specific warning signs, with ‘critical slowing down’ being the best studied; long-term data from a real system, a Chinese lake, now show that a flickering phenomenon can be observed up to 20 years before the critical transition to a eutrophic state. Flicker of recognition is fair warning Critical transitions in experimental and theoretical systems can be anticipated on the basis of specific warning signs, raising the prospect that it might also be possible to predict future real-world events on the scale of the 2007 global financial crisis and Arab spring. But what to measure? Recent work has focused on critical slowing down, in which a system's recovery from perturbation is reduced as the transition is approached. Another possibility is flickering, in which increasing shifts between alternative stable states are seen in the run-up to the transition. This study uses long-term data from a real system, a Chinese lake, to show that flickering can be observed and that it occurs up to 20 years before a critical transition — in this case the deterioration of a lake towards a dead 'eutrophic' state as algal growth consumes the last available oxygen. There is a recognized need to anticipate tipping points, or critical transitions, in social–ecological systems 1 , 2 . Studies of mathematical 3 , 4 , 5 and experimental 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 systems have shown that systems may ‘wobble’ before a critical transition. Such early warning signals 10 may be due to the phenomenon of critical slowing down, which causes a system to recover slowly from small impacts, or to a flickering phenomenon, which causes a system to switch back and forth between alternative states in response to relatively large impacts. Such signals for transitions in social–ecological systems have rarely been observed 11 , not the least because high-resolution time series are normally required. Here we combine empirical data from a lake-catchment system with a mathematical model and show that flickering can be detected from sparse data. We show how rising variance coupled to decreasing autocorrelation and skewness started 10–30 years before the transition to eutrophic lake conditions in both the empirical records and the model output, a finding that is consistent with flickering rather than critical slowing down 4 , 12 . Our results suggest that if environmental regimes are sufficiently affected by large external impacts that flickering is induced, then early warning signals of transitions in modern social–ecological systems may be stronger, and hence easier to identify, than previously thought.

As a significant trade item on the ancient Silk Road, the evolution of mug shapes represents a confluence of Eastern and Western economic history and cultural-artistic exchanges, also reflecting the flourishing export culture of Guangzhou. This paper analyzes the functional and social factors influencing the morphological changes of Lingnan mugs from 1616 to 1949 from the perspective of quantitative typological analysis. The overall design trend of these mugs transitioned from complex to simple, enhancing user comfort, while variations in mug scale reflect the diversity of consumer classes and regional drinking cultures. Among the 30 mugs analyzed, the average capacity was 356ml, with a range of 1588ml. Common shapes included cylindrical bodies and ear-shaped handles. Morphologically, the belly of the mugs transformed from arc-barrel bodies (emphasizing heat retention) to bulbous bodies, and eventually to cylindrical bodies (combining heat retention, practicality, and economy), with handles also showing signs of East-West integration. The analysis of the mug body’ s inclination, with handle-side junction angles ranging from 34° to 53° and wall-side junction angles from 50° to 90°, indicates that these features are associated with stability in placement, aesthetic design, and practicality in liquid containment. These morphological evolutions reflect genuine responses to market demands and advancements in production technology, manifesting as products of market orientation and societal needs. By measuring changes in morphology, scale, volume, and external contour curves, this paper addresses how social factors shape material morphology in an academic context.

Relying on documents previously unavailable to both Western and Chinese researchers, this history demonstrates how Western technology and evolving traditional values resulted in the birth of a unique form of print capitalism that would have a far-reaching and irreversible influence on Chinese culture. In the mid-1910s, what historians call the Golden Age of Chinese Capitalism began, accompanied by a technological transformation that included the drastic expansion of China's Gutenberg revolution. This is a vital reevaluation of Chinese modernity that refutes views that China's technological development was slowed by culture or that Chinese modernity was mere cultural continuity.