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)....
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