Jonathan Schlesinger

A World Trimmed with Fur (eBook, ePUB)

Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources.

In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century-pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, D ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Januar 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503600683
• Artikelnr.: 48419402

Autorenporträt

Jonathan Schlesinger is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction:
chapter abstract
In 1886, the explorer H. Evan James claimed to discover pristine nature in
Manchuria; the only order in Manchuria, he enthused, was Nature itself.
Strikingly, a century and half earlier, China's Qianlong emperor (r.
1735-1795) celebrated the region in similar language. Still further, his
court went to extraordinary lengths to defend both the Manchu homeland and
its unspoiled nature. What, then, constituted pristine nature in the Qing?
1The View from Beijing
chapter abstract
A momentous change occurred in eighteenth-century China: fur, together with
other products that seemed both exotic and natural, became popular. What
meaning did natural objects have in everyday life? Using archival and
literary evidence, pawnshop records, travel accounts, and sumptuary laws,
the chapter shows how consumer patterns and marketplace understandings of
nature shifted through the course of the eighteenth century. From a world
where no Chinese word existed for products such as "marten" and "Manchurian
pearl," consumers ushered in a new one where connoisseurship of furs marked
elite status, and words existed for every part of each animal's anatomy.
Though faux furs, farmed ginseng, and imitation wild Mongolian mushrooms
flooded the street, knowing consumers sought the real thing: undyed,
uncultivated products from the far north. While at first a court fashion,
by the mid-eighteenth century nature was for sale throughout the streets of
Beijing.
2Pearl Thieves and Perfect Order
chapter abstract
Something strange happened in Manchuria under Qing rule: its freshwater
mussels disappeared. Stranger still, the Qing empire did everything in its
power to preserve them: draft soldiers; fortify passes; patrol rivers; send
boats and horses and silver and men. It streamlined the bureaucracy and
revamped the local administration. "Nurture the mussels and let them grow,"
the emperor ordered; let Manchuria have mussels. Chapter explores what
happened: the collapse of the pearl fishery the attempts, in the language
of the Qing court, to "nurture the mussels." The court put its full weight
behind efforts to create a long-term sustainability: it reorganized the
administrative structure, empowered territorial governors, and created
militarized off-limits areas. Poachers were arrested; the mussels allowed
to rest. Through a detailed description of the tribute system, the
ecological crisis, and the court's response, the chapter documents how a
reinvented Manchuria came to be.
3The Mushroom Crisis
chapter abstract
As the pearl crisis raged, a rush for wild steppe mushroom moved to the
center of the imperial agenda in Mongolia. Unheralded and forgotten, steppe
mushrooms were big business in the Qing; by the 1820s, thousands of
undocumented workers crossed the internal boundary from China to Mongolia
each year in search of mushrooms. The chapter opens with the case of a
passport forger whose arrest triggered a court edict against mushroom
picking in 1829; we have little else of the affair in Chinese. The archives
in Ulaanbaatar, however, contain hundreds of documents that detail the
long, violent conflict that culminated in his arrest. By analyzing the
confessions of mushroom pickers and the depositions of local officials, the
chapter reconstructs the history of the mushroom rush and explores how a
recreating a "pure" and pristine environment in Mongolia became the top
concern of the court.
4The Nature in the Land of Fur
chapter abstract
In the borderland with Russia, a similar crisis emerged with furs: From the
Altai Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, sables, then foxes, then squirrels
vanished from the forest. In response, the Qing state again mobilized
itself for another "purification" campaign: it repatriated trespassers,
reinforced the boundary line around hunting zones, and attempted to ensure
the long-term sustainability of fur-bearing animals. The chapter documents
the interconnections between local, regional, and global fur trades in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides a case study of
the environmental crisis in Tannu Uriankhai lands, in modern Tannu Tuva.
There too, the archives show, the Qing court attempted to "purify" local
nature and remake it as pristine.
Conclusion:
chapter abstract
The resulting analysis of these dynamics provides a framework for
rethinking the global invention of nature. We cannot understand the
invention of "pure" nature, both within and beyond the China, without a
more nuanced and multifocal understanding of empires or the archives they
produced. Putting peripheral places like Mongolia at the center of our
histories, and learning to look both ways across frontiers, allows us to
gain new vantages on how to transcend entrenched distinctions between
foreign and frontier, coast and continent, East and West. Ultimately,
modern "nature" and Qing "purity" belong to a broader, global matrix of
historical inventions. Nature as we know today has deep, imperial roots.