The Qing Invention of Nature

This dissertation studies the nexus of empire, environment, and market that defined Qing China in 1750-1850, when unprecedented commercial expansion and a rush for natural resources - including furs, pharmaceuticals, and precious minerals - transformed the ecology of China and its borderlands. That boom, no less than today's, had profound institutional, ideological, and environmental causes and consequences. Nature itself was redefined. In this thesis, I show that it was the activism, not the atavism, of early modern empire that produced "nature." Wilderness as such was not a state of nature: it reflected the nature of the state.