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Abstract
This dissertation is an account of how the Qing empire (1644-1911) and their Republican successors incorporated the Qingshui river basin of southeastern Guizhou province and its forest resources. Before the Yongzheng emperor’s campaign of incorporation in the early-eighteenth century, indigenous villages only had intermittent contact with state authorities, and the region’s forest resources were lightly exploited. Imperial rule was aided by the presence of small native chieftaincies and isolated colonial settlements. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the political, economic and environmental landscape of the region was transformed. Local and regional elites, who owned and cultivated intensive plantations sent timber downstream to intermediate markets in large quantities. These elites mobilized indigenous political traditions and texts documenting customary practices relating to the timber industry in appeals to magistrates, securing a sphere that was separated from downstream Han traders and migrants. The villages and towns they inhabited became the new political and economic centers that anchored the region through the turbulence of rebellion, regime change, and globalization in markets for timber. The Qing central state thus managed to secure a region that was fraught with risk for inter-ethnic strife and disorder inimical to its role as a supplier of timber for downstream consumers. I argue that the conditions seen by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Qingshui river basin were achieved by two means. The first is that Qing magistrates worked with elites who emerged from the timber trade to protect customs and practices that favored indigenous traders and wage workers. These customs and practices created pathways for social and economic mobility, and aided in the retention of surpluses generated from the trade within the region through wage work and profits from arbitrage. Second, magistrates and elites found ways to incorporate indigenous political traditions, such as the kuanyue village alliance, into formal structures of Qing sub-country administration. These hybrid institutions provided a venue for sustained engagement between indigenous political elites and magistrates.