Xavier Beck L&S Social Sciences
Ordering Trees in Republican Nanjing: Transpacific Seeds of Knowledge
How are people thinking about nature at the turn of the 20th century? And what transpacific connections influenced these ideas? Scholars, missionaries, and commercialists traveled across the Pacific and carried with them ideas about trees. I examined the writings of a Berkeley resident and dual US-China citizen, Joseph Bailie. My findings suggest that the University of California and Jinling College in Nanjing both operated within their respective locales as sites for producing modern ideas about nature and that the knowledge flowed both ways across the Pacific.
Jinling College had its roots in missionary education and began developing its Department of Agriculture and Forestry out of Bailie’s colonization schemes, one of which was curiously titled “”Forest Colony””. These projects of Bailie’s involved transport, both sending and receiving, of saplings and seeds within China and across the Pacific. The journeys of these plant materials coincided with changes in ideas about how to organize nature. In ordering trees, for planned projects and within soil beds, affiliates of Jinling College were making conscious choices about how to make sense of nature—just as was occurring at the UC.
Message To Sponsor
SURF Leadership, I was able to test a lot of tools and approaches to archival research in this project. After completing SURF, I head into my final year and a capstone thesis project which will build out of my summer findings. My favorite aspect was reading primary and secondary sources about this understudied aspect of history. Thank you the support—without it, I would not have had the chance to work full-time with these materials. SURF has shown me how rewarding it is to be a scholar full-time, and I now have my sights set on graduate study in history.