In early modern England, wood scarcity was a widespread concern.
Royal officials, artisans, and common people expressed their fears
in laws, petitions, and pamphlets, in which they debated the
severity of the problem, speculated on its origins, and proposed
solutions to it. No Wood, No Kingdom explores these conflicting
attempts to understand the problem of scarcity and demonstrates how
these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of
England's earliest colonies. Popular accounts have often suggested
that deforestation served as a "push" for English colonial
expansion. Keith Pluymers shows that wood scarcity in England,
rather than a problem of absolute supply and demand, resulted from
social conflict over the right to define and regulate resources,
difficulties obtaining accurate information, and competing visions
for trade, forestry, and the English landscape. Domestic scarcity
claims did encourage schemes to develop wood-dependent enterprises
in the colonies, but in practice colonies competed with domestic
enterprises rather than supplanting them. Moreover, close studies
of colonial governments and the actions of individual landholders
in Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados demonstrate that
colonists experimented with different, often competing approaches
to colonial woods and trees, including efforts to manage them as
long-term resources, albeit ones that nonetheless brought
significant transformations to the land. No Wood, No Kingdom
explores the efforts to knot together woods around the Atlantic
basin as resources for an English empire and the deep underlying
conflicts and confusion that largely frustrated those plans. It
speaks to historians of early modern Europe, early America, and the
Atlantic World but also offers key insights on early modern
resource politics, forest management, and political ecology of
interest to readers in the environmental humanities and social
sciences as well as those interested in colonialism or economic
history.
General
Imprint: |
University of PennsylvaniaPress
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
The Early Modern Americas |
Release date: |
May 2021 |
First published: |
2021 |
Authors: |
Keith Pluymers
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 26mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
296 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8122-5307-8 |
Categories: |
Books >
Humanities >
History >
General
Books >
History >
General
|
LSN: |
0-8122-5307-8 |
Barcode: |
9780812253078 |
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