Timber Trade along the Yangzi River: Market, Institutions, and Environment, 1750-1911

This dissertation studies the history of the long-distance timber trade along the Yangzi River during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This voluminous trade is an important aspect of the economic, environmental, and frontier history of Qing China, but has yet to receive much examination in the literature. In addition to published materials, my study employs contracts, palace memorials, legal cases, guild records, and genealogies collected from several Chinese archives. The cultivation, trade, and taxation of timber lend the focal points for me to address a number of central debates regarding state building, environmental transition, and business paradigms in Chinese history. I examine the evolution of the relationship between the state and merchant groups, the enforcement mechanisms that sustained the expansion of long-distance trade networks, the economic and environmental impacts of core-periphery integration, and the property rights regime that enabled market-oriented reforestation.This study provides the first reconstruction of the overall structure of the South China timber trade with hand-collected data and situates the story of timber in a broader perspective. It demonstrates the way in which merchants and the state negotiated the institutional foundations for their relationship, and how such institutional arrangements co-evolved with and reshaped the trade environment for two centuries. The project’s scrutiny of the mechanisms of contract enforcement rejects the dichotomy of formal and informal institutions derived from European experiences and argues that formal and informal institutions existed along a continuum instead of in separate spheres in China’s late imperial and Republican history. It also explores the impacts of the state and market expansion into the internal ethnic frontiers in the Southwest. By examining the local population’s active participation in the timber trade and tree planting, this study highlights their economic agency and revises the one-sided story from earlier works that unsophisticated natives were deprived of their resources by in-migrating Han colonizers. The property rights regime on timberlands adopted here and elsewhere across South China effectively solved the liquidity problem associated with the long-term nature of tree growth and proved successful in promoting commercialized reforestation in a rural household-based economy