ann
(Ann)
#1
tribute, borderland Manchus experienced radical alterations of their
environmental ties as alienation from the foraging that had forged them
into the empire’s premier military human resources. An increasingly
“cultured nature”of imperial foraging emerged during the eighteenth
century under bureaucratic and political pressures from China proper.
Chapter 3 covers the dynastic construction of “banner Mongol”
identity as the embodiment of its order of imperial pastoralism in
response to steppe political rivals and extreme weather. The Qing used
dependencies of herders on climate, grass, and livestock to construct this
order, but state actions to uphold it could undermine themselves. The
provision of agrarian aid, in the form of grain and silver, as the main form
of state disaster relief and debt recovery for continuously stricken Mongol
herds unintentionally alienated people from their livestock. Mongol pas-
toral identity, critical for dynastic control of the steppe borderland, was
commensurately attenuated. The region’s fragile, butflexible, econtone
also left it vulnerable to another unintended consequence of the Qing
incorporation of Inner Mongolia, namely, Han migration powered by an
arablism incompatible with imperial pastoralism.
Chapter 4 examines southwestern Yunnan’s disease environment as
the greatest environmental challenge to Qing borderland formation.
“Imperial indigenism”was the main dynastic borderland strategy in a
region whose malarial vectors, mosquitoes and blood parasites, remained
beyond informed control. These vectors’effectively invisible condition
precluded the more direct orchestration of people-animal relations char-
acteristic of imperial foraging and imperial pastoralism. Differential
resistance to disease prevented the direct presence in substantial numbers
of the empire’s main, but susceptible, embodiments of Han, Manchu, and
Mongol, while endowing the indigenous population with sufficient
staying power. Consequently, the Qing focused on the relatively exclusive
construction of a“civilized tribal”identity, whose formation was also
inhibited by the region’s primary environmental relation, swidden
agriculture. Differential resistance to malarial mosquitoes in particular
conferred a substantial autonomy on indigenous peoples, who were pos-
itioned to exploit yet another imperial rivalry, here with Myanmar, that
compelled Qing borderland formation.^45
Chapter 5 compares my three borderland case studies through brief
examinations of nineteenth-century conditions as the consequences of
Qing adaptation and maladaptation became more pronounced. The
“dynamics of disharmony”that resonated recursively across the state’s
orchestration of environmental relations during this period originated
14 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
