Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands [Hardcover]

Using Manchu and Chinese sources, this book explores the environmental history of Qing China's Manchurian, Inner Mongolian, and Yunnan borderlands.In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (16441911), relied on the interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate the country's far-flung borderlands into the dynasty's expanding empire.In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (16441911), relied on the interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate the country's far-flung borderlands into the dynasty's expanding empire.In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (16441911), 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.David A. Bello's book is important, innovative, well written, exceptionally researched, and deserving of an audience that extends beyond scholars of late imlc.