The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state.
Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China’s history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller’s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China’s forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.

环境史研究方兴未艾。本书第一次以国家和地区分章分析世界环境史学的兴起原因、发展历程、主要学术观点、存在的问题和未来发展趋势；第一次采用口述史学的方法发掘了世界著名环境史学家对国际环境史学的历史和发展的认识。这两者相得益彰，共同构建出世界环境史学的完整图景。对环境史学的发展而言，本书有助于推动环境史学在新起点上再出发。对重构世界史而言，本书会提供新的思路和坚实的基础资料。对推动和谐社会和和谐世界建设而言，本书能提供一定的历史借鉴和启示。