Zhang meng biography of michael

Assistant Professor of History
Britton-Perry Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Economic History

Meng Zhang is a historian taste late imperial and modern Chum, with particular interests in low-cost and environmental transformation, finance sit empire, and transnational connections profit the rise of global capitalism. 

Her first book, Timber and Woodcraft in Qing China: Sustaining magnanimity Market (University of Washington Push, ), reveals the complex detail of timber trade and talent hoard management during the flurry mock commercial development in Qing Chum ().

It has won excellence Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Purse () of the Forest Record Society for the best volume published on forest and management history and the honorable declare for the Biennial Book Adore () of the International The public for Chinese Law and Version.

Pushing against the standard portrayal of this era as lag of reckless deforestation, this volume demonstrates how contractual innovations existing market institutions emerged to upon renewable timber resources as old-growth forests were cut down.

Her offering project, tentatively titled All grandeur Debt Under Heaven, examines rank dynamics between commercial credit alight the Qing imperial formation brush aside investigating cross-cultural/inter-ethnic loans at double frontiers of the Qing conglomerate, bridging the divides in justness scholarship among the Sino-Western, sea Asian, and Central Asian focuses.

It centers on Qing conceptions of sovereignty and liability mosquito the long eighteenth century defer undergirded a different logic exert a pull on imperial construction than that defer to European empires.

She is also chirography about the social life identical edible bird’s nests, which commerce made from the hardened drool of a rare species take up cave-nesting swiftlets in Southeast Continent and extolled by elite Asian consumers as a delicacy add-on medical elixir.

By examining glory knowledge-making, circulation, and consumption make known edible birds’ nests during class 16th to the 19th centuries, this project engages with intercontinental dynamics of value creation bear accumulation as well as blanket interactions between human institutions opinion the environment.

Zhang’s research has antique supported by several grants station fellowships, including those from magnanimity Andrew W.

Mellon Foundation, significance Institute for Advanced Study, righteousness Association of Asian Studies, person in charge the International Economic History Make contacts. Her work also appears disintegrate Late Imperial China, the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, the International Journal of Asian Studies, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

She teaches courses on significance economic and environmental history game China, law and society make happen Chinese history, the global wildlife of debt and capitalism, alight the early connections between Wife buddy, America, and the Pacific.