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as much from Qing success as from its failure in the process of imperial
borderland construction. The realm’s primary contradiction between
culture and ecology at this time was the spread of Han arablism into
the empire’s borderlands and its intensification in the imperial core. This
spread, however, is examined not in terms of population increase, but as a
function of the production and degradation of arable land. Fields may
have actually declined in many areas due to unsustainable Han agrarian
practices, sometimes dynastically promoted under imperialist, mainly
Russian, pressure. I conclude with a consideration of some of the wider
implications of all these relations as a Qing“environmentality” that
worked to construct each as part of an organic whole.
This study cannot pretend to be comprehensive, even within the
limits of its three case studies, whose multiethnic character nevertheless
makes some degree of essentialization unavoidable. The more ambigu-
ous terms such asHuaandXiahave been translated as“Han”in most
circumstances. Diverse groups are unavoidably lumped together under
rubrics such as“Manchu foragers,”“Mongol herders,”and“indigen-
ous swiddening peoples,” although I have attempted to clarify and
qualify these terms where appropriate.^46 The book, however, does
expand on the considerable body of existing work on all three regions
in a comparative direction that has hardly been mapped. Social and
natural science research, including extreme climatology, rangeland sci-
ences, ecological anthropology, and nonequilibrium ecology, has
helped to make this approach possible. Above all, Manchu sources
have been the prerequisite for a detailed historical analysis, especially
of those borderlands where Manchu was the primary language of
official communication.^47 Although by no means an argument for an
exclusive“Manchu-centric”historiography, the book is an extended
demonstration of the language’s importance explored in previously
published versions ofChapters 3 and 4. I have also used Manchu
sources to expand an earlier published version ofChapter 5.^48
Nevertheless, limitations, individual and structural, have prevented me
both from accessing a greater range of the existing record, especially in
Russian and Mongolian, as well as from being adequately conversant
with all the pertinent natural sciences. Acknowledgment of limitations has
been one of the lessons I have learned from the practice of both border-
land and environmental history. In many respects exposure to the diver-
sity of its imperial margins seems to have conferred a like awareness on
the Qing state, which ceased to expand its frontiers by the closing years of
the eighteenth century and which evinced increasing difficulty in keeping
Introduction 15
