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Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books
Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China
A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state.
Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China’s history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller’s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China’s forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.
The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.
The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state.
Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China’s history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller’s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China’s forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.
The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.
280 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 30, 2020
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May 3, 2022Read this for a course paper I wrote. Not rating it because I still haven’t really worked out how I feel about what this book was trying to accomplish. It really bugged me listening to Niall Ferguson talk about this book when interviewing the author for the Hoover Institution. I feel gross just writing a sentence with both those names in the same sentence.
Ian Miller’s Fir and Empire focuses on fir plantations in South China between 1000 and 1700 CE, arguing against the prevailing narrative that China’s forests were in continual decline over those centuries. Rather, Miller highlights monoculture tree plantations that came to supplant diverse forest cover. This was done not through direct state oversight, but rather imperial projects like logging and shipbuilding contracting out lumber production to privately owned monocultural timber plantations and relying on tariff mechanisms to secure revenue and supplies. This offers a view of both deforestation and reforestation in an East Asian imperial context preceding and overlapping with the period of European imperial projects.
Miller mentions that the first forest management institutions in China emerged in the early Qin (221 BCE – 207 BCE) and Han (207 BCE – 220 CE) dynasties as population growth and fire use in forests began catalyzing China’s first wood crisis. Miller also specifies warfare and its attendant demand for iron being a principal cause for the loss of large forest areas in the tenth and eleventh centuries under the Song dynasty. Miller’s principal focus however is a period of state contraction under the Ming dynasty. Reforested tree plantations were not subject to direct state control, but only indirectly buttressed by the state through market mechanisms. This encouraged ethnic groups like the Hakka away from swidden cultivation towards agriculture and tree cultivation. However, Miller also recognizes that these monoculture plantations were significantly more vulnerable to wildfires.
Miller dedicates two out of seven chapters to specifically exploring the relationship between wood and water in Chinese forest history. The focus of this wood-water nexus is twofold. Firstly, the high density of rivers that were both navigable and able to transport timber to distant markets became the basis of a fractional tariff that the state used to manage wood supply. In concert with official shipyards, a small fraction of each log raft arriving in market centers would be claimed by the state, allowing management of the timber supply with negligible oversight directly over forests themselves. To transport logs over such vast distances, workers faced dangerous rapids, robberies, and a frequent lack of food supplies. Miller notes a Sichuan record lamenting, “A thousand enter the mountains, but only five hundred leave.”
Secondly, Miller emphasizes how naval timber has long been recognized as the basis of empire-building, most prominently in Robert Albion’s Forests and Sea Power, which Miller depends on heavily as he tries to orient its insights of the British Navy to the case of China’s imperial project. The absence of direct state oversight over forests in China, meant that the bureaucracy was situated farther downstream, quite literally, functioning at sites near or within shipyards where timber had already been transformed cleanly into standardized market commodities. Reforestation and forest maintenance then was not principally a product of state intervention but private initiative combined with remote imperial demand for naval construction.
Miller offers the case of early modern China as a case where land that was governed by an imperial state in retreat managed to foster private initiatives of silviculture that reforested large tracts of land with monoculture tree plantations suitable for distant imperial shipbuilding projects. For centuries the two major strains of agriculture in Southern China were tax-paying lowland rice farmers and the highland swidden farmers who largely evaded taxes. However, as lowland demand for timber climbed along with later demand from imperial ship construction, increasing numbers of shifting cultivators in the upland regions turned to commercial silviculture, which drove much of the reforestation efforts in early modern China.
Miller also emphasizes that with the dissolution of direct imperial oversight of forests and the move towards silviculture under private management, there was a parallel transition from corvée labour to waged labour. He also recognizes the enormous toll these monoculture plantations took on ecosystems and habitats, and the continuity between commodification’s consequences, past and present. Despite Miller emphasizing the forces of private markets, he is also cautious about drawing lines too directly between legal concepts of Chinese political economy and those predominant in contemporary Western systems, noting “the notions of ‘contract,’ ‘property,’ and ‘rights’ are all imperfect fits to the Chinese legal context.” However, the main thrust of Miller’s remarks is that large-scale reforestation projects happened with little state involvement.
I wanted to conclude with an excerpt that is only marginal to the book, but was one of the most interesting parts of it for me, which was a comment on the Hakka diaspora in relation to revolutionary movements in China:
“…the growing conflicts of the mid- to late Qing both reflected and precipitated the emergence of new forms of social organization in the highlands, tied to the Hakka diaspora in particular. As David Ownby shows, marginalized men created secret societies—including the “triads” of kung fu cinema—and became increasingly heterodox in the face of suppression. These societies spread throughout southeastern China along with the movement of landless men, many of whom were laborers in upland industries including timber planting and cash cropping. Later, the Communists brought another novel form of social organization to the highlands. Mary S. Erbaugh and Sow-Theng Leong document the particular connection between Hakkas and the rebellions and revolutionary movements emerging from South China between 1850 and 1949: Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan was a Hakka, and so were major Communist revolutionaries like Zhu De and Deng Xiaoping. This connection may be a bit too facile; despite the preponderance of Hakka revolutionaries, Stephen C. Averill shows that ethnic identity did not map directly onto political affiliation. Nonetheless, changes in land use and wood rights were a red thread connecting revolts and rebellions across South China for generations. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries merely brought more dispossessed people with new forms of organization to an environment increasingly crowded with rival claimants and depleted of resources.”
Ian Miller’s Fir and Empire focuses on fir plantations in South China between 1000 and 1700 CE, arguing against the prevailing narrative that China’s forests were in continual decline over those centuries. Rather, Miller highlights monoculture tree plantations that came to supplant diverse forest cover. This was done not through direct state oversight, but rather imperial projects like logging and shipbuilding contracting out lumber production to privately owned monocultural timber plantations and relying on tariff mechanisms to secure revenue and supplies. This offers a view of both deforestation and reforestation in an East Asian imperial context preceding and overlapping with the period of European imperial projects.
Miller mentions that the first forest management institutions in China emerged in the early Qin (221 BCE – 207 BCE) and Han (207 BCE – 220 CE) dynasties as population growth and fire use in forests began catalyzing China’s first wood crisis. Miller also specifies warfare and its attendant demand for iron being a principal cause for the loss of large forest areas in the tenth and eleventh centuries under the Song dynasty. Miller’s principal focus however is a period of state contraction under the Ming dynasty. Reforested tree plantations were not subject to direct state control, but only indirectly buttressed by the state through market mechanisms. This encouraged ethnic groups like the Hakka away from swidden cultivation towards agriculture and tree cultivation. However, Miller also recognizes that these monoculture plantations were significantly more vulnerable to wildfires.
Miller dedicates two out of seven chapters to specifically exploring the relationship between wood and water in Chinese forest history. The focus of this wood-water nexus is twofold. Firstly, the high density of rivers that were both navigable and able to transport timber to distant markets became the basis of a fractional tariff that the state used to manage wood supply. In concert with official shipyards, a small fraction of each log raft arriving in market centers would be claimed by the state, allowing management of the timber supply with negligible oversight directly over forests themselves. To transport logs over such vast distances, workers faced dangerous rapids, robberies, and a frequent lack of food supplies. Miller notes a Sichuan record lamenting, “A thousand enter the mountains, but only five hundred leave.”
Secondly, Miller emphasizes how naval timber has long been recognized as the basis of empire-building, most prominently in Robert Albion’s Forests and Sea Power, which Miller depends on heavily as he tries to orient its insights of the British Navy to the case of China’s imperial project. The absence of direct state oversight over forests in China, meant that the bureaucracy was situated farther downstream, quite literally, functioning at sites near or within shipyards where timber had already been transformed cleanly into standardized market commodities. Reforestation and forest maintenance then was not principally a product of state intervention but private initiative combined with remote imperial demand for naval construction.
Miller offers the case of early modern China as a case where land that was governed by an imperial state in retreat managed to foster private initiatives of silviculture that reforested large tracts of land with monoculture tree plantations suitable for distant imperial shipbuilding projects. For centuries the two major strains of agriculture in Southern China were tax-paying lowland rice farmers and the highland swidden farmers who largely evaded taxes. However, as lowland demand for timber climbed along with later demand from imperial ship construction, increasing numbers of shifting cultivators in the upland regions turned to commercial silviculture, which drove much of the reforestation efforts in early modern China.
Miller also emphasizes that with the dissolution of direct imperial oversight of forests and the move towards silviculture under private management, there was a parallel transition from corvée labour to waged labour. He also recognizes the enormous toll these monoculture plantations took on ecosystems and habitats, and the continuity between commodification’s consequences, past and present. Despite Miller emphasizing the forces of private markets, he is also cautious about drawing lines too directly between legal concepts of Chinese political economy and those predominant in contemporary Western systems, noting “the notions of ‘contract,’ ‘property,’ and ‘rights’ are all imperfect fits to the Chinese legal context.” However, the main thrust of Miller’s remarks is that large-scale reforestation projects happened with little state involvement.
I wanted to conclude with an excerpt that is only marginal to the book, but was one of the most interesting parts of it for me, which was a comment on the Hakka diaspora in relation to revolutionary movements in China:
“…the growing conflicts of the mid- to late Qing both reflected and precipitated the emergence of new forms of social organization in the highlands, tied to the Hakka diaspora in particular. As David Ownby shows, marginalized men created secret societies—including the “triads” of kung fu cinema—and became increasingly heterodox in the face of suppression. These societies spread throughout southeastern China along with the movement of landless men, many of whom were laborers in upland industries including timber planting and cash cropping. Later, the Communists brought another novel form of social organization to the highlands. Mary S. Erbaugh and Sow-Theng Leong document the particular connection between Hakkas and the rebellions and revolutionary movements emerging from South China between 1850 and 1949: Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan was a Hakka, and so were major Communist revolutionaries like Zhu De and Deng Xiaoping. This connection may be a bit too facile; despite the preponderance of Hakka revolutionaries, Stephen C. Averill shows that ethnic identity did not map directly onto political affiliation. Nonetheless, changes in land use and wood rights were a red thread connecting revolts and rebellions across South China for generations. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries merely brought more dispossessed people with new forms of organization to an environment increasingly crowded with rival claimants and depleted of resources.”
July 24, 2022
I really enjoyed this one and its thorough discussion of the dynamics that created the world's first commodity-driven anthropogenic forest biomes in dynastic China. Miller intricately details how communities, markets, and, to a lesser extent, regulations were successful in managing the landscape for timber production. Though the market eventually plundered most of the last of the old growth forests from the east coast to the timber frontier, it is astounding how a hodge-podge of regulations, community dynamics, and built-in constraints, among other things, enabled the successful reality that these anthropogenic biomes became. I'd be remiss not to mention that the author successfully (I'll take the butcher's word for it) pushes back on Elvin's hypothesis that the various iterations of the Chinese nation-state gradually degraded the land's natural bounty from abundance to scarcity. Through meticulous research, Miller demonstrates that through a combination of de facto and de jure regulation, timber managers were largely successful at meeting market demands, with a few major exceptions.
As a non-academic person reading this book, I kind of lost focus on some of the more labored, intensive discussions of tax regulations and owner-owner interactions, etc. I knew this book was well-reviewed and extensively researched and that didn't disappoint, but I was drawn to it due to its shared subject-matter with "The Retreat of the Elephants." Having read that a few years ago (my memory could be flawed), I recall larger discussions of ethnography and ecology. I understand that the scope of the author's research and purpose was not necessarily these areas of study so I don't knock him for not including more on that. That being said, though there are very interesting insights peppered throughout the rest of the text, my favorite passages of the book were the introduction and conclusion (I know, I'm basic) because the author takes more liberties with his assumptions about the evidence presented and he takes a longer view on the environmental history of China and the macro implications of these environmental alterations on the people.
As a non-academic person reading this book, I kind of lost focus on some of the more labored, intensive discussions of tax regulations and owner-owner interactions, etc. I knew this book was well-reviewed and extensively researched and that didn't disappoint, but I was drawn to it due to its shared subject-matter with "The Retreat of the Elephants." Having read that a few years ago (my memory could be flawed), I recall larger discussions of ethnography and ecology. I understand that the scope of the author's research and purpose was not necessarily these areas of study so I don't knock him for not including more on that. That being said, though there are very interesting insights peppered throughout the rest of the text, my favorite passages of the book were the introduction and conclusion (I know, I'm basic) because the author takes more liberties with his assumptions about the evidence presented and he takes a longer view on the environmental history of China and the macro implications of these environmental alterations on the people.
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