Since the field of environmental history first developed in the 1970s, use of the term “nature,” with its associations with Western philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment, science, and Romanticism, has become increasingly problematic in non-Western contexts. With A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, Jonathan Schlesinger makes clear that chasing equivalence between the English word “nature” and the various terms that appear in the Qing discourse leads down a blind alley. Instead, his fascinating new book examines the invention of nature on the Qing borderlands from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century as the product of a particular and historically specific Qing concern with the ideas of “purity,” ethnic identity, and boundary-making.