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Shellen X. Wu, Jonathan Schlesinger. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1590–1591, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1590
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Since the field of environmental history first developed in the 1970s, use of the term “nature,” with its associations with Western philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment, science, and Romanticism, has become increasingly problematic in non-Western contexts. With A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, Jonathan Schlesinger makes clear that chasing equivalence between the English word “nature” and the various terms that appear in the Qing discourse leads down a blind alley. Instead, his fascinating new book examines the invention of nature on the Qing borderlands from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century as the product of a particular and historically specific Qing concern with the ideas of “purity,” ethnic identity, and boundary-making.
Schlesinger approaches his work through the close reading of Qing documents and multilingual archives in Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. The impressive juxtaposition of findings from archives in Taipei, Beijing, and Ulaanbaatar makes a convincing case for the Qing’s invention of a distinct notion of nature as a process of empire-building on its frontiers. In recognizing the importance of going beyond the Chinese-language sources, Schlesinger builds on the foundations of New Qing history from the last two decades, which placed China in a global spectrum of early modern empires while engaging with the ways in which the Manchu-ruled dynasty both expanded and redefined a multiethnic imperial ideology. Similarly, by placing his research in the context of expanding commercialization and commodities networks from the sixteenth century, Schlesinger joins a growing coterie of historians who have recognized the importance of such global connections in the early modern world. At the same time, Schlesinger makes an original argument about how the histories of the environment, empire, and borderlands combined forces in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China to result in the invention of an allegedly “pristine” wilderness, a notion that still resonates today. Not coincidentally, the areas deemed by the Qing court to be worthy of protection have in recent decades become national parks in the People’s Republic of China.
