ann
(Ann)
#1
This is why particular sorts of soil subject to particular climate conditions
were the primary limiting factor for preindustrial expansion. Livestock
numbers beyond the passes, as detailed inChapter 3 , also increased.
A less anthropocentric perspective sees interdependencies between“both
humans and the animals and plants on which they depend for a
livelihood...as fellow participants in thesameworld, a world that is at
once social and natural.”^6
Such terrain is effectively unexplored in prevailing socioeconomic
analyses of Qing China. Interpretations have focused on human popula-
tion increase as, conventionally, the source of nineteenth-century systemic
dysfunction or, more recently, as indicative of a preindustrial“East Asian
miracle” of development. Some western scholars are questioning this
convention as the monocause of dynastic decline, while most scholars
working in China adhere to it, even in explicitly ecological approaches.^7
Whether emphasizing eighteenth-century gains or nineteenth-century
losses, both arguments generally proceed from people, as producers and
consumers, alone. Answers to questions concerning the changes in area
and species of plant cover, for example, might not only help to undermine
or bolster conventional wisdom, but also transform the nature of its terms
of“success”and“decline.”^8 Analyses more fully informed by environ-
mental perspectives could constructively confront the visible dynastic
contradictions. Currently, it is difficult to integrate overt signs of
“ecological problems,...challenges to the rural social order”and weak
state control with equally explicit“evidence of commercial growth,”
urbanization, and enhanced state capacities“that reflect more positive
possibilities.”^9
Compare, for example, the competition for land in areas such as
Muran that initially created ecological problems for Inner Asian
hunter-foragers and economic opportunities for Han cultivators, but
eventually hurt both. The Qianlong emperor observes in “What
I Saw”that land clearance for agriculture and Han settlement had been
conducted at the expense of foraging space to restrict battue hunting to
reserves such as Muran over a thirty-year period from 1729 to 1759.
Poaching of preserve resources dates from before this time, and pressure
on Muran is evident from the inception of the Yongzheng reign. As early
as 1723 there was a request submitted to the throne to permit cultivation
of some fertile Muranfields to produce reserves for price control of
grain in Beijing.^10
By the early nineteenth century there was a marked decline in the
preserve, which had been subjected for decades to Mongol and Han
222 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
