Relieving Mongols of Their Pastoral Identity: Disaster Management on the Eighteenth-Century Qing China Steppe

Abstract

This article explores the contradictory effects of state disaster relief on the Inner Mongolian steppe borderland of China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911). As a Manchu-dominated polity most noted for its unprecedented unification of vast Inner Asian territories with China proper, the Qing had to manage complex environmental dependencies between humans, climate, vegetation, water resources, and animals across diverse borderlands. In Inner Mongolia these dependencies, ordered under what I term imperial pastoralism, were based on sustaining connections between Mongol herders and their livestock, which were continuously disrupted by harsh steppe conditions. Imperial state adaptation to these largely uncontrollable conditions constrained central administrators to provide “agrarian” (grain and silver), rather than “pastoral” (livestock) forms of disaster relief. This assistance helped alienate Mongols from their herds and, consequently, from the pastoral identity on which the Qing northern borderland order was based. This process predates the emergence of more direct and conventional pressures from nineteenth-century ethnic Chinese agrarian steppe migration.