Book ID: CBB869490594

Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (2020)

unapi

Miller, Ian Matthew (Author)
Sutter, Paul S. (Author)


University of Washington Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 296
Language: English

The disappearance of China's naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country's history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China's early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state.Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China's history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller's work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China's forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.

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Reviewed By

Review Meng Zhang (2021) Review of "Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China". East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine. unapi

Review Chris Coggins (October 2021) Review of "Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China". Environmental History (pp. 812-814). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB869490594/

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Authors & Contributors
Andrea Bonoldi
Alessandra Dattero
Li, Xinsheng
Lazzarini, Antonio
Liu, Guanglin William
Meng Zhang
Concepts
Natural resource management
East Asia, civilization and culture
Forests and forestry
Medicine
Environmental history
Shipbuilding industry
Time Periods
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
Ming dynasty (China, 1368-1644)
Song Dynasty (China, 960-1279)
Medieval
Early modern
Yuan Dynasty (China, ca. 1260-1368)
Places
China
Italy
Europe
Adige River (Italy)
Spain
Japan
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