1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910563095903321

Autore

Miller Ian Matthew

Titolo

Fir and Empire : The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China / / Ian M. Miller

Pubbl/distr/stampa

University of Washington Press, 2020

Seattle : , : University of Washington Press, , [2020]

ISBN

9780295747347

029574734X

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (vi, 274 pages)

Collana

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

Disciplina

333.750951

Soggetti

Déboisement - Chine - Histoire

Foresterie - Chine - Histoire

Forest management

Deforestation

Forest management - China - History - 960-1644

Deforestation - China - History - 960-1644

History

China 1368-1644 (Dynastie des Ming)

China 1260-1368 (Dynastie des Yuan)

China 960-1279 (Dynastie des Song)

China

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword: The Great Reforestation -- Acknowledgments -- List of Maps, Figures, and Tables -- Naming Conventions -- Introduction -- 1. The End of Abundance -- 2. Boundaries, Taxes, and Property Rights -- 3. Hunting Households and Sojourner Families -- 4. Deeds, Shares, and Pettifoggers -- 5. Wood and Water, Part I: Tariff Timber -- 6. Wood and Water, Part II: Naval Timber -- 7. Beijing Palaces and the Ends of Empire -- Conclusion -- Appendix A: Forests in Tax Data -- Appendix B: Note on Sources -- Glossary -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books



Sommario/riassunto

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.