A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule Schlesinger Jonathan
A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule Schlesinger Jonathan In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources…
Specifikacia A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule Schlesinger Jonathan
A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule Schlesinger Jonathan
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets.
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. 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. In response, the court turned to