The 1931 Yangzi River Flood was one of the most extensive and damaging of the many floods in China during the twentieth century. It extended into eight provinces in central China and beyond to the north, west, and south. As many as 50 million people may have been affected, losing homes and crops. An unknown number of people died, as many as 2 million (3–5). Occurring when the Nationalist government was establishing itself at Nanjing but also when Communist insurgent forces were threatening, the flood received a great deal of international attention and assistance. Yet, as Courtney notes, it has never been the subject of an academic monograph.
Courtney employs a multidimensional perspective that benefits from new trends in environmental history, as well as the more conventional institutional and political approaches of historians. To this end, he presents six histories of the 1931 flood. In the first, “The Long River,”...