Timber and Forestry in Qing China : Sustaining the Market

Zhang, Meng; Sivaramakrishnan, K. (FRW)

ISBN 10: 0295748877 / ISBN 13: 9780295748870

Edité par University of Washington Press, 2021

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Timber and Forestry in Qing China : Sustaining the Market
• Éditeur: University of Washington Press
• Date de parution: 2021
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0295748877
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780295748870
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• État de l'article: good

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Winner of the 2022 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for best book on 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.

À propos des auteurs

Meng Zhang is assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2017. This is her first book.

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.