Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands

Using Manchu and Chinese sources, this book explores the environmental history of Qing China's Manchurian, Inner Mongolian, and Yunnan borderlands.

David A. Bello (Author)

9781107068841, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 February 2016

350 pages, 5 maps 9 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

'Bello's meticulously researched and eloquently written book will certainly resonate for environmental historians, but the story that emerges from this remarkable piece of scholarship extends well beyond environmental history.' Hang Lin, Asian Affairs

In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), relied on the interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate the country's far-flung borderlands into the dynasty's expanding empire. The dynasty tried to manage the sustainable survival and compatibility of discrete borderland ethnic regimes in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan within a corporatist 'Han Chinese' imperial political order. This unprecedented imperial unification resulted in the great human and ecological diversity that exists today. Using natural science literature in conjunction with under-utilized and new sources in the Manchu language, Bello demonstrates how Qing expansion and consolidation of empire was dependent on a precise and intense manipulation of regional environmental relationships.

Introduction
1. Qing fields in theory and practice
2. The nature of imperial foraging in the SAH basin
3. The nature of imperial pastoralism in southern Inner Mongolia
4. The nature of imperial indigenism in southwestern Yunnan
5. Borderland Hanspace in the nineteenth century
6. Qing environmentality.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Asian history [HBJF]