ICS Lecture: Ian Miller, "Taming the Mountains and Marshes: Non-Agrarian Landscapes in China's Early Modern Transition"

Ian Miller
February 18, 2022
4:00PM - 5:30PM
Online (registration required)

Date Range
2022-02-18 16:00:00 2022-02-18 17:30:00 ICS Lecture: Ian Miller, "Taming the Mountains and Marshes: Non-Agrarian Landscapes in China's Early Modern Transition" The Institute for Chinese Studies presents: "Taming the Mountains and Marshes: Non-Agrarian Landscapes in China's Early Modern Transition" Ian Miller St. John's University with commentator Roger Williams Associate Professor, Forest Management and Wildland Fire Science, The Ohio State University Abstract: In many historical contexts there is an almost axiomatic distinction between farms as the known, cultivated realm and woodlands and wetlands as the unknown, wild one. This distinction generally carried both institutional and environmental consequences: farmland was exclusive, bounded property planted by human hands; wilderness was common, open land conceived as natural bounty. But over time changes in both cultivation and record-keeping blurred the distinction between farmland and wilderness. Cultivators planted fruit, fuel, and timber trees like field-crops; they diked marshes to build fields, and dug artificial ponds for irrigation and fish-farming; they documented ownership of the plots they had improved. In China, this process of wildland enclosure accelerated between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. By the 1390s, the government surveyed and taxed forests alongside farms. As it brought new biomes “onto the map,” the state created institutions to tax and surveil their residents as well. I will claim that these institutions represented a new watershed in environmental history: a period when centralized surveillance of the landscape extended from farms to forests and fisheries. After tracing the outlines of these changes in southern China, I will close by considering the significance of these developments in global history. Ian M. Miller is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a BA from Swarthmore College and an AM and PhD from Harvard University. Since 2015, he has been Assistant Professor of History at St. John's University in New York, where he teaches Chinese history, environmental history, and world history. In 2016-17, Dr. Miller was a Program Fellow in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is the author of Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press: 2020), and co-editor of The Cultivated Forest: People and Woodlands in Asian History (University of Washington Press: Forthcoming 2022). Dr. Miller is currently working on a history of village environments, tentatively titled Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in Southern China.  Online (registration required) America/New_York public

The Institute for Chinese Studies presents:

"Taming the Mountains and Marshes: Non-Agrarian Landscapes in China's Early Modern Transition"

Ian Miller
St. John's University

with commentator

Roger Williams
Associate Professor, Forest Management and Wildland Fire Science, The Ohio State University

Abstract: In many historical contexts there is an almost axiomatic distinction between farms as the known, cultivated realm and woodlands and wetlands as the unknown, wild one. This distinction generally carried both institutional and environmental consequences: farmland was exclusive, bounded property planted by human hands; wilderness was common, open land conceived as natural bounty. But over time changes in both cultivation and record-keeping blurred the distinction between farmland and wilderness. Cultivators planted fruit, fuel, and timber trees like field-crops; they diked marshes to build fields, and dug artificial ponds for irrigation and fish-farming; they documented ownership of the plots they had improved. In China, this process of wildland enclosure accelerated between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. By the 1390s, the government surveyed and taxed forests alongside farms. As it brought new biomes “onto the map,” the state created institutions to tax and surveil their residents as well. I will claim that these institutions represented a new watershed in environmental history: a period when centralized surveillance of the landscape extended from farms to forests and fisheries. After tracing the outlines of these changes in southern China, I will close by considering the significance of these developments in global history.

Ian M. Miller is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a BA from Swarthmore College and an AM and PhD from Harvard University. Since 2015, he has been Assistant Professor of History at St. John's University in New York, where he teaches Chinese history, environmental history, and world history. In 2016-17, Dr. Miller was a Program Fellow in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is the author of Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press: 2020), and co-editor of The Cultivated Forest: People and Woodlands in Asian History (University of Washington Press: Forthcoming 2022). Dr. Miller is currently working on a history of village environments, tentatively titled Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in Southern China

 

 

Free and Open to the Public (registration required)

If you require an accommodation, such as live captioning, to participate in this event, please contact EASC at easc@osu.edu. Requests made at least two weeks in advance of the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date. 

This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.