Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market

Meng Zhang's Timber and Forestry in Qing China is an economic history of timber in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, focusing on the lower Yangzi River and adjacent regions. Zhang innovates by employing quantitative methods alongside more traditional institutional history to demonstrate how Chinese market actors navigated the economic and geographical expansion of timber markets, and thus illuminates the economic system in new ways.Timber and Forestry in Qing China is decidedly an economic history, but it differs from other works in Chinese economic history in important ways. Zhang's work provides some of the firm empirical—specifically quantitative—foundation that Chinese economic history has long lacked. Zhang's approach does away with the failure narrative still common in this subfield, which has been defined by a supposed problem of unsustainable growth on the macro level, and instead focuses on what sustainability and resilience meant for the people who inhabited market institutions. Sustainability, in this context, included replanting trees to make up for extensive deforestation. Resilience included a set of shared market practices across space that allowed private interests to negotiate fluctuations flexibly on the basis of new information. Here Zhang intervenes effectively in the long-standing question of whether the state-merchant relationship in the late Qing hampered the growth of independent market actors. The answer is a resounding no, as Zhang provides detailed case studies of how merchant groups and brokers actually operated, not in a general sense, nor just in one market, but across two similar regions and in different markets (chapters 4 and 5). There is much here that an economic historian of early modern Europe would find familiar, especially the examination of supply chains and credit.Zhang focuses exclusively on timber. While this choice may disappoint someone looking for environmental history, it is logical and compelling: timber was the most vital commodity for construction in premodern China, and it makes sense to follow its circulation. Moreover, forestry was deeply intertwined with political economy as an indispensable industry for the state. What historians prior to Zhang have missed is that state procurement and consumption depended on a market. As Zhang shows, as demand for timber grew and forests were exhausted, cultivation moved into new regions. The market for timber then grew substantially in the lower Yangzi River region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as demand increased, and networks of production and circulation expanded into mountainous hinterlands. This led to standardization of measures and of practices related to ownership, tenancy, and shareholding across the region, which Zhang demonstrates quantitatively and through documentary evidence, along with the empowerment of local agents.Those networks and agents are described in some detail in the final chapters, including through a quantitative network analysis that establishes the relationships and relative importance of timber brokers in Hangzhou. Court cases, always a good source for social relations as demonstrated in the breach, speak to how brokers and sellers formed relationships of credit across space. Together these studies provide Zhang with highly suggestive evidence to argue for a timber market that was decentralized at the center but concentrated at its peripheries in outposts on non-Han ethnic frontiers. In that space, knowledge was power, and merchants placed a premium on market information, while brokers sought to match reliable trading partners.Zhang is concerned with big questions, and this is laudable, as the China field so often loses sight of them, or else approaches them simplistically. At the same time, Zhang's story of network expansion recalls parallel processes of expansion, development, and migration along the Pearl River, as described by Steven Miles, and I found myself missing the rich social texture that a historical anthropological approach can provide. Hopefully Timber and Forestry in Qing China will inspire further research. While Zhang is right to take a finely grained approach to comparison, I would also have appreciated more discussion of how the phenomena she describes, particularly the increasingly laissez-faire Qing approach to the political and economic empowering of merchant organizations, compare to similar developments across the empire, which are referenced but not discussed at length.Zhang's epilogue turns from economic history toward questions, which remain open, about environmental sustainability under different economic systems. Although I greatly appreciate the epilogue's injunction to attend to the “fine print of local institutions” (177), the preceding chapters seem to be building toward a more robust conclusion. It strikes me that Zhang's picture of the timber market is very far indeed from Max Weber's onetime assertion that Confucianism cannot foster capitalism, and certainly far from any outdated notion of “despotism” in China. I think that her book demonstrates not only that those old and flimsy arguments, which China historians have engaged critically on their own merits, should finally be ignored entirely. Timber and Forestry in Qing China instead shows that it is not only possible but highly desirable to integrate quantitative methods into the study of premodern Chinese economic patterns and institutions. It is a truly innovative and important book.