A World Trimmed with Fur
Subtitle: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: Jan 11, 2017
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780804799966
Description: 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. 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.
Notes: Source title: A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule