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Forests and French Sea Power, 1660-1789 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,241
Discovery Miles 12 410
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Forests and French Sea Power, 1660-1789 (Paperback)
Series: Heritage
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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By choosing to concentrate upon discovering what forest resources
were available to the French navy during the ancien regime and what
use it was able to make of them, Mr. Bamford has not only provided
the first monograph on that subject in the English language, but
has gone far toward explaining why France was the loser in the long
duel with England for the control of commerce and the extension of
empire. Two years of research in the Archives Nationales and in the
Archives de la Marine in Paris, Toulon, and Rochefort enabled him
to draw on contemporary sources of information of which little, if
any, use has been made before, and a further year of research in
the libraries of New York City, particularly in the rich Proudfit
Naval Collection, also yielded new material. It is Mr. Bamford's
achievement to have handled this vast store of primary sources with
such skill and judgement that the reader, by turning over letters
from disgruntled forest proprietors, reports from harassed maitres
on the trickery and recalcitrance of the peasants, instructions
from the top echelon of the navy to inspectors in the forests, and
a variety bills, receipts, and memoranda, is given at first hand an
appreciation of the difficulties faced by the navy in trying to
obtain timber and masts of the choice quality required for building
ships-of-the-line. The navy had to compete with the merchant marine
and with industrial and private users of fuel for supplies that
were continually being depleted by mismanagement and by the
conversion of forests to arable land. Measures, superficially
admirable, for conserving the forests are found on closer
examination to be at once over-precise and not properly enforced.
Transport, even in a country so abundantly supplied with navigable
rivers as France, was expensive and difficult. Not only historians,
but scholars in the field of forestry, economics, geography,
agriculture, and transport will find this book illuminating.
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