It's been a while since I made a book post but uh, I have still been reading. Check the book list post for what else I've been reading lately. Amongst these though, this is the one I like the most though, so post time. This one was very nice to read through I think, it even had a recipe for venison stew in it.
The book is about the environmental policies of the Qing dynasty on the outer parts of the empire, those being modern day Manchuria, Mongolia and the border on the Russian empire, and also how natural preserves were created. During the period it covers, there was a commodity rush on pearls, mushrooms, and furs in those places, which lead to extreme environmental damage and depletion. It uses these commodities to look at both the environmental damage done to animals, but also the people who gathered them. The book shows how there were a lot of minority groups whose identities weren't simply Manchu, Chinese or Mongolian.
In response to the environmental damage, the Qing court sought to 'restore' what they thought were pure lands that had only been recently damaged due to the commodity booms, and one of the main arguments of this book is that these pure lands with unmixed peoples never existed in the first place. It had to be created and maintained with state power, namely with border surveillance and police work.
The book also tracks the court's ideology throughout this process, and how it ties into both their environmental policies and social ones. Environmentally, the court was in strained position, as it both wanted furred products due to it being a signifier of prestige and martial vigour, but it couldn't hunt the animals into extinction. The book points out how the imperial ideology had the emperor act as a protector of wildlife too, and this resulted in temporary moratoriums on hunting or fishing when tribute levels got too low. I appreciate how the book also tied this into why the Qing didn't extract coal or industrialise the northeast until they had to. Rather than attributing it to simply superstition, it shows that the court also had environmental concerns.
Socially, they wanted to keep Manchurian, Mongolian and Chinese subjects from mixing and influencing each other, so their tools ended up being policing and deporting undocumented workers back to their home places. The court also had very clear ideas on what each kind of people should be like, both in terms of cultural values (Mongols and Manchus should be honest, frugal and austere), but in what their occupations should be. In particular, the court had a perception of the Uriankhai Mongols as purely hunters, even though they were in part pastoralists, and even had agriculture. They then put these groups to work as hunters, gathering animal furs while imagining this was a way of preserving their culture. I think this reminds me of what I read in the Ainu book where the Japanese administrators thought that the Ainu wasn't fit for farming.
Things like overextraction of mushrooms resulting in damaged steppeland were attributed to undocumented Chinese workers crossing the border in search of profit, so the court's solution to protect the environment was to set up guard posts to prevent crossing and to clear out picking camps. They also blamed them for corrupting innocent Mongols who they considered to be easily tricked by the promise of profit. This is how the book shows that their environmental policies were tied to their social policies, since protection of the environment in this framework is done through enforcing borders between the places in the empire. There were never any pure places where the peoples didn't interact, so the court had to try and make it so. I find the arguments in this area particularly persuasive.
Aside from internal policies, it shows how the Qing was in a central position of an interconnected commodity consumption, importing wild goods from southeast Asia, the Pacific Northwest and Northeast and Hawaiʻi, and the resulting damage from that. In this way, it pushes back against the old narrative that the Qing were completely unaccepting of trade until the west opened it through the opium wars.
I find the arguments in this book to be very convincing, but even aside from that, I think the book is just a really nice read. It has very vivid descriptions of the areas it surveys, and great descriptions of why these goods was valuable to people at the time. The book gives good data on just how much animal populations fell and the reasons why it did too, aside from just simply saying overhunting.
The book has very nice sources too, not only using Chinese documents but Manchu ones too, from archives in both Mongolia, China and Taiwan. It even compares them to find discrepancies between them, such as how Chinese documents don't distinguish between different kinds of Uriankhai Mongols where as the Manchu ones do.
Looking at commodity production as a way to analyse history is something I find super interesting as well, definitely need to find more books like this. Definitely give it a read if you're interested in either the Qing or a book about our conceptions of what nature looks like more broadly.