“The Retreat of the Forests—The Advance of the Tree Plantations”

Over the past two millennia, most of the once vast forests of South China have been replaced with ecosystems built by and for humans. While the flat lowlands are used for agriculture, large areas of South and Central China too hilly for farming have instead been planted with a slower-growing crop: trees. Ian Miller’s pioneering Fir and Empire tells the story of how silviculture developed in the Yangzi River Valley under the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties (960–1644). The book shows that “despite the near total absence of bureaucratic forest management, China’s general-purpose fiscal policies enabled an astonishingly productive commerce in timber and other forest products” (p. 8). In contrast to early modern European state-run forestry, Miller explains, China’s state did not take direct control over woodlands, but provided the administrative support to regulate the timber market and to allow people to register forested land as legal property. This book is an important contribution to the historiography on China, which rarely addresses the administration of woodlands, and to the well-developed field of forest history, which rarely mentions China.¹

The fact that China’s empires did not directly administer woodlands is not only important for understanding the history of silviculture but also for understanding why forests have not been a popular area of historical research. Unlike topics of interest to governments, such as water control, there are no treatises on privately owned woodlands. Fortunately, printing became common during the period covered by the book, and vastly more written sources are available from this time than from any earlier period. But information on woodlands is scattered across this large body of texts, making it difficult for historians to find. As Miller notes in the appendix on sources, what made this research possible was the digitization of texts, which allowed him to search a vast corpus of documents for specific words. Because he found so many useful texts, the book’s bibliography of primary sources is a useful reference, though it would have been more useful if it had included Chinese characters. In any case, it is worth noting that this book is an example of the type of scholarship being made possible by digitization.

The first chapter begins by arguing that before the eleventh century timber in China was obtained from natural forests that could be cut freely because woodlands lay outside of the state-enforced system of private property. It was also cut from forests in western frontiers and floated downstream. Miller argues that the pivotal changes in timber policy were the result of the Jin Empire’s conquest of the Song in 1127. This forced the (now Southern) Song Empire to relocate to the lower Yangzi, where it lacked access to western forests and was forced to find new sources of timber. The solution was to extend administration over nonagricultural land, turning areas that the state had previously ignored into private property that could be legally bought, sold, and taxed. By guaranteeing private ownership of hilly land, the state provided the stability and legal protections that made it profitable for private actors to plant that land with trees. This was essential because it would be too risky for anyone to manage woodlands over decades without a strong guarantee that they would be the ones to cut and sell the trees. As historians of China will be aware, this transition from direct state control over the economy toward a more laissez faire economic policy in this period was an important turning point in Chinese political history more generally. As with modern capitalism, what might superficially appear to be a “free market” was in fact the result of robust administrative structures that guaranteed private property rights and facilitated commerce in order to increase overall economic productivity and tax revenue. Miller is therefore quite right to describe these administrative reforms as the roots of...