We know Zuo Zongtang. We have read of his violent military campaigns and industrial development projects; we have eaten what is billed as his sweet chicken recipe. All of this makes Peter B. Lavelle's choice of Zuo as the narrative linchpin of his sophisticated new book, The Profits of Nature, an inspired one. Lavelle mines Zuo's life and writings for previously overlooked nuggets—his experiments with rice cultivation, his careful readings of geographical texts, his reluctant acceptance of the market and promotion of (certain) cash crops—to tell a story of new, and particularly agricultural, colonial projects along the northwestern edges of the Qing Empire. Faced with a range of crises in the nineteenth century, Zuo and other like-minded statesmen imagined new environmental regimes that matched their emerging understanding of “the empire's considerable abundance of natural resources and their potential for development” with increasingly China-centered notions of territorial power (p. 168). As Lavelle concludes, this “underlying logic of colonial development [has] persisted” (p. 177).
The Profits of Nature is divided into six chronological and thematic chapters. In chapter 1, “Agriculture in an Era of Crisis,” we encounter Zuo, not simply as a young exam candidate and local teacher but as a budding agronomist. Buffeted by personal disappointments and larger socioenvironmental disasters, Zuo drew on centuries of agricultural writings, especially those promoted by his pragmatic teachers, the leading statecraft thinkers of his era, to envision a stable countryside and rich state. His engagement was not simply intellectual: he got his hands dirty on his estate just south of Dongting Lake, trying out the labor-intensive cropping patterns that he had read about. Zuo's later schemes in the northwest and, Lavelle hints, the subsequent modern colonial projects of the twentieth century, began here, with the “everyday agrarian technologies” of China's past (p. 10). The second chapter continues along a similar route. Zuo, we learn, was part of a wide network of officials and intellectuals invested in understanding the vast geographies of the Qing Empire and reimagining the relationship between demography—the labor surplus of the provinces—and territory—the abundant land and resources of the frontier.
The real heart of Lavelle's study comes after these background chapters, as we follow Zuo and his armies up through war-ravaged Gansu and Xinjiang, with a brief, initial foray through Zhejiang. Chapter 3 traces the environmental aftermath of the mid-century's bloodletting and how, confronted by population losses and “undomesticated plants and animals . . . rewilding former farmlands” (p. 66), Qing officials “intensified their drive to make the most of the empire's natural resources” (p. 65). Zuo established reconstruction bureaus in devastated jurisdictions to provide relief to peasants (stemming the loss of farm labor) and dispersing agricultural tools and plow animals (getting lands back in production and paying taxes to emptied coffers). These policies were punitive and driven by ethnicized understandings of the violence: Zuo resettled thousands of Muslim men and women in the desolate Liupan Mountains to mobilize their labor in opening the wastes.
Chapter 4 continues with Zuo's years in Gansu. In his writings, Zuo parroted well-worn attacks on commerce and profit-seeking, opium-planting peasants, but, reading beneath the boilerplate, Lavelle reveals how the governor-general sought to take advantage of market forces and substitute moral cotton for decidedly immoral opium. The same economies underlay efforts to transform silviculture in the Turkic-speaking oases of Xinjiang, the focus of chapter 6. Local use of mulberry groves here—for firewood, for irrigation embankments, and, especially, for fruits to make wine—seemed an inefficient and backward waste to Zuo and other officials from southern China. At great expense, they shipped thousands of silkworms and mulberry saplings from the east and set up experimental teaching stations to make Xinjiang a center of silk production. As the forms of mulberry cultivation, silkworm rearing, and filament spinning favored by Hunanese generals were particularly labor-intensive, the promotion of this distinctly China-style silk regime was also about disciplining frontier bodies.
This same theme runs right through chapter 5, “Water in a Fertile Frontier.” Despite the region's aridity, Qing officials intent on bringing new lands into cultivation found what they lacked was not necessarily water but labor. The work needed for upkeep of the resulting waterworks involved increasingly direct forms of state coercion. “In this sense,” Lavelle writes, “the Qing state's domination of the territory and the exploitation of its natural resources was enacted through the everyday politics of controlling local people and their labor power” (p. 134). New environmental relationships were manifested in new relations of power and new ideas of development that privileged production and dismissed frontier economies, and peoples, as especially backward. The next logical step would be harder forms of control and the importation of more advanced labor from the east.
It should not be too surprising to learn that Zuo's projects occasionally crashed upon complex local realities. Gansu peasants simply planted opium in difficult-to-see ravines; Turkestani villagers held fast to their fruit-bearing mulberry trees; silk reelers engaged in “sabotage,” slow-walking, and other weapons of the weak. Though the discussion of local mulberry use in chapter 6 is excellent, it is here that Lavelle could have delved just a little deeper. Failures were not simply about “inconsistent support for development projects” (p. 171), but perhaps also about the arrogance of officials lecturing peasants—those whose hands knew the soil in far more intimate ways than the local magistrate, whose villages had accumulated generations of expertise in agriculture—about the best way to farm.
But this is minor; The Profits of Nature is ultimately about the state and the intersection of environmental and colonial development, and in this it more than succeeds. Lavelle is a good storyteller and uses Zuo in truly clever ways to pull us through his gripping narrative. His engagement with the relevant literature is admirably subtle; I turned the page to follow his compellingly human portrait, but I ended up with a far clearer picture of the late Qing and its frontiers, global empire and environmental history—and, to be sure, a clearer picture of the continuing patterns of colonial development in China's borderlands today. The Profits of Nature is a great book.
