Fir and empire the transformation of forests in early modern China Miller, Ian Matthew creator author. JSTOR (Organization) text bibliography Electronic books. History. wau 2020 monographic eng remote 1 online resource (xxi, 265 pages) : color illustrations, maps "The disappearance of China's naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country's history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China's 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, China's history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller's work rectifies this omission, and suggests that in some ways, China's forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions"-- Ian M. Miller. Includes bibliographical references and index. a-cc--- Deforestation China History 960-1644 Forest management China History 960-1644 HISTORY Asia China Deforestation Forest management China Deboisement Chine Histoire Foresterie Chine Histoire Chine 1368-1644 (Dynastie des Ming) Chine 1260-1368 (Dynastie des Yuan) Chine 960-1279 (Dynastie des Song) 960-1644 fast SD418.3.C6 M55 2020 333.750951 Fir and empire Miller, Ian Matthew. Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2020] 1st. (DLC) 2019046834 Weyerhaeuser environmental book 9780295747347 029574734X 0295747331 9780295747330 9780295747330 2019046835 22573/ctv143d7d9 JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv143mdn1 DLC 200225 20230103223502.5 in00004635527 eng