Fir and EmpireAuthor :
Hardback
Published : Tuesday 30 June 2020
Description
A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
The disappearance of Chinas naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the countrys history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. Chinas 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, Chinas history is often left out of global conversations about them; Millers work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, Chinas forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.
The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.
You may also like ...
by
Paperback
22 Oct 2021
Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval
€32.16
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Hardback
05 Jan 2021
Philosophy of language
€30.99
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Hardback
17 Jul 2014
Literature: history and criticism
€128.70
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Paperback
01 Dec 2015
Plays, playscripts
€12.86
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
Reviews