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(Ann)
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The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner
Mongolia
In 2001 , theTaipusiBanner of the Shili-yin Gool League was contem-
plating restoring itsfields, configured for agricultural mass production, to
pastures. The main rationale was that prevalent environmental conditions
were more suitable for herding than for the intense, and ecologically
debilitating, agriculture that had generally characterized the area for
much of the preceding century.^1 I have found no more eloquent statement
of the transhistorical environmental limitations on human agency that
helps to explain the necessity for adaptation, both by the Qing dynasty
and by the PRC to grassland conditions.
As the modern condition of the Taipusi Banner implies, the socio-
economic dimension of Mongol identity has not been limited to a single
expression.^2 In a general sense identity was certainlyfluid, but overall
steppe conditions favored pastoralism as the primary, if not only, mode of
human adaptation. It is certainly true that although in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Mongolia there was no unified Mongolulus or
nation, contemporary sources make it impossible “to suggest that
‘Mongols’did not exist at this time or that the Qing ‘created’ the
Mongols.”^3 Nevertheless, a distinct variant of Mongol identity emerged
under dynastic auspices, fashioned in dynamic tension with existing
nature and culture.
This Qing Mongol identity was formed within the larger environmen-
tal framework of imperial pastoralism as the basis of a northern imperial
borderland. This framework’s period of formation roughly coincides with
the dynasty’s conquest of the Mongol steppe from the late seventeenth
to the mid–eighteenth centuries. Inner Mongolia became the core of the
Qing pastures north of the Great Wall during this time, which also
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