Over the past two decades or so the field of Chinese history has seen a steady stream of new works that have deepened our understanding of late imperial and early republican economic history. These works have benefited from previously unavailable archival materials, both state managed and privately collected. Their authors have leveraged this documentary trove to tell stories that are both empirically rich and theoretically important. In doing so they have not only opened up new arenas for investigation and challenged earlier depictions of China's past. They have also begun to make deep engagement with the Chinese case an indispensable part of comparative economic history.

Meng Zhang's new study, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market, is an outstanding example of this new scholarship. As the title suggests, its main subject is the market in timber that made possible the dramatic expansion of both state and private construction during the last dynasty. Sustainability is a key part of her story, as are the complex trading networks that replaced state procurement and met the increasing demands of the private sector. The institutions that both supported sustainable forestry and underpinned the market in logs relied on aspects of the robust system of private ordering that lay at the heart of China's late imperial legal system. While some of these institutions have been discussed elsewhere, Zhang's description of their operation, their interdependent evolution, and their specific adaptation to forestry contributes to a new understanding of the interaction among China's distinctive cultural endowment, the increasingly laissez-faire approach of the Qing state to the commercial sector, and the role of the frontier and frontier communities in the late imperial period.

One of Professor Zhang's most important contributions is her revision of the narrative of Chinese neglect of its forest resources. Standard histories all point to the destruction of highland forests by generations of Chinese in search of timber for construction and land for settlers, a process that most certainly contributed to ecological as well as social catastrophe in many parts of China. What standard histories rarely address are the practices introduced during the late imperial period to replenish forest resources and provide the materials for China's largely wood-based imperial and domestic architecture. Meng Zhang's early chapters set the stage by examining imperial timber consumption and the state's shift to reliance on market purchase to satisfy all but its need for the largest old-growth logs. In the process she contributes to a broader understanding of Qing economic policy, providing evidence of state efforts to be fair toward competing merchant groups and protect merchants from corrupt local officials. However the great gift of the first half of the book is her discussion of the growing importance of plantation forestry in the Chinese economy.

Plantation forestry emerged as a solution to the depletion of old growth forests, a problem addressed in many other parts of the world by means of state regulation and investment. The particular form it took in China relied instead on private investment and the division of that investment among landowners on whose land trees were grown, tenants whose investment was based in labor, and others with diverse economic motivations. This production system drew on a long tradition of shareholding and the transferability of shares, the use of contracts to allocate a wide variety of property rights, and institutions of corporate ownership and management born of Chinese lineage practices. In an industry like forestry (we see similar institutional innovations among Zigong's salt manufacturing firms and elsewhere), in which the time from planting to harvest and sale of timber averaged thirty years, these institutions allowed investors to spread risk and provided necessary flexibility and liquidity. It also, in Zhang's telling, created incentives to engage in sustainable practices that allowed the industry to flourish at least until undercut by foreign timber imports in the twentieth century.

Zhang's discussion of mountain forestry in the Qing, despite its complexities, constitutes one of the most lucid examples of the role of shareholding and its deep roots in Chinese society. As her main examples are taken from China's southwestern frontiers, they also provide evidence of the diffusion of mechanisms of private ordering and the increasingly national character of customs governing shareholding and contractually transacted property regimes. This alone would have made Timber and Forestry a major contribution to Chinese economic history. However, the second half of the book, which deals with the market in timber as it leaves the mountain is equally remarkable for its command of the details of this specific industry and its analysis of the role of brokers and other intermediaries in the provision of both credit and market information. By the late nineteenth century a growing number of trade associations would appear as mediators between members and the state, and as constituent parts of a new institution, the Chamber of Commerce. Zhang provides compelling evidence that the strength of these associations arose from their ability to shield members from a late-Qing state desperate for revenue and better able than before to tax individual merchants. The benefits of association membership, especially its collective payment of the member merchants’ “duties” to the state, was a strong incentive to remain in good standing. This in turn gave associations the power to enforce contracts among members, discipline defaulters and otherwise maintain sets of common norms that in turn were often recognized by the state. As the courts—both the Chinese and the mixed courts of the treaty ports—became more active in commercial dispute litigation in the twentieth century, the authority cultivated by these associations gave them a continuing role in commercial litigation at least until the 1930s.

Timber and Forestry is a focused study of a long neglected sector of the early modern Chinese economy. Quantitative data on the volume and value of goods traded in Chinese markets is always difficult to obtain, especially for the imperial period. An example of Zhang's painstaking efforts to provide reliable estimates is her creative use of customs data and scattered qualitative data on log and raft size to estimate the number of logs reaching Nanjing during the period 1725 to 1850, when the Taiping Rebellion interrupted trade. Her commitment to context is appreciated as well. For the reader unfamiliar with the details of imperial Chinese political economy, this is a work that is attentive to what you need to know. For the specialist it is skilled in the logical weaving together of the impact of a complex set of institutions and practices. This should encourage a wide readership among comparative historians as well as China scholars.