This book resulted from a conference held in Germany in 2000 on the concept of "nature" in China and Europe before the eighteenth century. Edited by Günter Dux, a specialist of sociology and social philosophy, and by Hans Ulrich Vogel, a historian of Chinese sciences and techniques, the book includes fifteen contributions introduced by two preliminary articles by Mark Elvin, who in the last twenty years has contributed to opening up the field of Chinese environmental history. His first contribution is the overview for the book, which sets out the issues raised and sheds light on the different theories legitimating this type of project: cross-cultural in character, with well-known complexity. A theoretical framework grounded in recent biological, climatological, and psychological discoveries, as well as Dux's "historical-genetic theory of culture," thus underlies the contributions, all of which aim to evaluate the varying degrees of convergence and divergence between these two cultures in history.
While cross-cultural in its approach, the book does lean toward China, which Elvin justifies by the scarcity of scholarly studies on this subject from that country, and at least three misunderstandings that the contributors of this book want to clear up. The first, refuted by Christoph Harbsmeier, is the idea that in China there was no concept equivalent to "nature" as understood in Europe (220). The second, highlighted by Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, is that any concept of nature thought to have existed in China is viewed as unchanging and timeless, while the historical relativism of the same concept in the West is taken for granted (526). From this, a third and more general misunderstanding arose: the assumption "that, in pre-imperial and most of the imperial period, educated Chinese and educated Western Europeans inhabited totally, or almost totally, distinct mental universes as regards the styles of thinking about the natural world that were seen as acceptable" (5). Notably, Heiner Roetz's analysis destroys the image of an empathetic and holistic Chinese approach to nature completely different from that of the West (199), which, had it (ever) existed, would have been a definite obstacle to development of the modern forms of subjugation of nature
