Event
CEAS Humanities Colloquium
A series of unprecedented resource rushes swept through China’s frontiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Qing empire was transformed. Yet by limiting our histories to Qing frontiers, we blind ourselves to phenomena that transcended conventional boundaries: The jade trade boomed simultaneously in both Xinjiang and Burma; wild ginseng collection surged in both Manchuria and Chosŏn Korea; fur trade flourished from Mongolia, to Hokkaido, the Russian Far East, and coastal California. In many cases, moreover, the environmental consequences of these resource rushes were similar. By 1840, rhinos and elephants had largely disappeared from forests in the Qing south and the greater Pacific; sea otters nearly went extinct in Manchuria and Mexico alike.
How do we make sense of the peculiar geography formed by these trades? Which historical dynamics were limited to China’s borders, and which transcended them? This talk finds answers in the challenging particularities of microhistory, exploring how the contingent richness of individual lives can transect imperial boundaries. It focuses in particular on the story of five castaways – Francisco, Ferdinando, Andres, Mariano, and Caetano – whom the Qing and Chosŏn courts investigated in 1801 and highlights their connection to the era’s booming ivory and rhino horn trades. Their tragic story, I argue, illuminates unseen connections between the environmental histories of not only Qing China, but Chosŏn Korea, Tokugawa Japan, Macau, and East Timor.
Jonathan Schlesinger is a historian of late imperial China and environmental history. His first book, A World Trimmed with Fur, 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 transformed the ecology of China and its borderlands. That boom, no less than today’s, had profound institutional, ideological, and environmental causes and consequences. Indeed, the boom years witnessed a reinvention of nature itself. Early modern wilderness was not a state of nature; it reflected the nature of the state.
His research builds from experience in the PRC, Taiwan, and Mongolia. He works with Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian language archives, loves the study of material objects, and is drawn to the global dimensions of China’s environmental history. In pursuit of such global connections, his current research examines the history of five castaways – including two Africans – that mutinied and escaped to the Korean coast in 1800, thus prompting a series of investigations by the Qing, Chosŏn, and Portuguese states. The project explores the castaways' entanglements with these powers, details their ties to the ivory and rhinoceros horn trades, and reveals the problems of identity they posed for all governments and scholars who encountered them.