Jonathan Schlesinger, "A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule," (Stanford University Press, 2019)

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. In A World Trimmed with Fur, 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. Jonathan Schlesinger is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. Qing Dynasty Environmental History Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur Natural Resource Demand in China Manchu and Mongolian Archives Qing Frontier and Environmental Change Eighteenth-Century China and Nature Elite Fashion and Wild Resources in China Poaching and Resource Exhaustion in Qing Era Qing Court Environmental Policies Invention of Nature in Chinese History Pearl Trade and Ecosystem Impact Frontier Management in Qing Dynasty Global Perspectives on Environmental History China’s Environmental Transformation