David Bello

Education

• Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University, 2002-03
• Ph.D. in Chinese History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2001
• Certificate in Chinese Studies, Nanjing University-The Johns Hopkins University Center for Chinese and American Studies, Nanjing, 1993
• M.A., Area Studies, Far East, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1989
• B.A. in History, magna cum laude, University of Dayton, 1985

Research

• Qing China, 1644-1912
• Borderland Environmental History
• Environmental history of the Qing empire, with a focus on its borderlands

Teaching

• Chinese history (borderland, gender, environmental)
• Japanese history (imperialism)

Selected Publications

Monographs

• Across Forest, Steppe and Mountain: Environment, Identity and Empire in Qing China’s Borderlands. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  
  
• Opium and the Limits of Empire, Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729-1850. Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 2005.
  
  

Articles

• “Cultivating Torghut Mongols in a Semi-Arid Steppe.” Journal of Chinese History, 2.2 (July, 2018): 355-72.
  
  
• “Consider the Qing Locust.” East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, 48 (2018): 49-80.
  
  
• “Transformation through Inundation: Riziculturing Muslim Identity in Qing Dynasty Khotan.” In Ts’ui-jung Liu, Andrea Janku, and David Pietz, eds.,Landscape Changes and Resource Utilization in East Asia: Perspectives from Environmental History. (Routledge, 2018).
  
  
• “Milk, Game or Grain for a Manchurian Outpost: Providing for Hulun Buir’s Multi-Environmental Garrison in an Eighteenth-Century Borderland.” Inner Asia, 19.2 (2017): 240-73.
  
  
• “Relieving Mongols of their Pastoral Identity: The Environment of Disaster Management on the 18th Century Qing China Steppe.” Environmental History, 19.3 (July, 2014): 480-504.
  
  
• “The Cultured Nature of Imperial Foraging in Manchuria.” Late Imperial China, 31.2 (December, 2010): 1-33.
  
  
• “To Go Where No Han Could Go for Long: Malaria and the Qing Construction of Ethnic Administrative Space in Frontier Yunnan.” Modern China, 31.3 (July 2005): 283-317.
  
  
• “The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 62.1 (November 2003): 1109-42.
  
  

Web-Based Publications

• “Environment, Demographics and Economy in Qing China.” In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Oxford University Press, Sept., 2021.
  
  
• “Environmental Change and Chinese Empire.” In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Oxford University Press, Feb., 2020.
  
  
• “Environmental Issues in Pre-modern China.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Oxford University Press, March, 2014; updated 2018.
  
  
• “Opium as a Historical Commodity.” In Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange. Adam Matthew Digital, 2012.
  
  

Review Essays

• “Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Some Peoples without Others.” Judd C. Kinzley’s Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands and Niansheng Song’s Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919, Twentieth Century China 45.2 (May 2020): 218-224.
  
  
• “Such Stuff as Qing Borderlands Are Made On.” Kwangmin Kim’s Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market and Jonathan Schlesinger’s A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, in Cross-Currents: East Asian Culture and History Review, 23 (June 2017): 158-69.

Current Research

• Environmental history of the Qing empire, with a focus on its borderlands