Timber and Forestry in Qing China
Sustaining the Market
- 280 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Winner of the 2022 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for best bookon forest and conservation history, sponsored by the Forest History Society Honorable Mention for the 2022 ISCLH First Biennial Book Prize, sponsored by the International Society for Chinese Law and History Traces the sourcing of logs that fueled early modern urbanization In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the resource misuse that devastated European forests at the same time. This comprehensive new study shows that the reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Historian Meng Zhang traces the trade routes that connected population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? This carefully constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on resource management, early modern commercialization, and sustainable development.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
- Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan
- Acknowledgments
- Measures and Related Terminology
- Chronology of Later Dynasties and Qing Reign Periods
- Introduction
- Chapter One: Obtaining Timber for the Court
- Chapter Two: The Interregional Timber Market
- Chapter Three: Sustaining the Resources
- Chapter Four: Merchants, Brokers, and Market Dynamics
- Chapter Five: Trade Associations, “Contributions,” and Contract Enforcement
- Epilogue
- Appendix A: Estimation of Timber Tax and Trade Volume at Longjiang Guan
- Appendix B: Estimation of Timber Tax at Jiujiang Guan
- Appendix C: A Methodological Note on Land Contract Analysis
- Chinese Character Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List