Title No wood, no kingdom : political ecology in the English Atlantic / Keith Pluymers

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] ©2021

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 307 pages) : illustrations, maps Series The early modern Americas Early modern Americas. Contents Introduction: a wooden world -- Scarcity, conflict, and regulation in England's royal forests -- Creating scarcity in Ireland's woods -- The political ecology of woods in Virginia -- Conservation and commercialization in Bermuda -- Deforestation and preservation in early Barbados -- Toward an Atlantic or imperial political ecology? Summary 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 Analysis American History American Studies Ecology Environmental Studies Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-296) and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 05, 2022) Subject Forest policy -- England -- History -- 16th century Forest policy -- England -- History -- 17th century Political ecology -- Great Britain -- History Forests and forestry -- Political aspects -- England -- History Forests and forestry -- Political aspects -- Ireland -- History Forests and forestry -- Political aspects -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- History Scarcity. HISTORY -- United States -- Colonial Period (1600-1775) British colonies Forest policy Forests and forestry -- Political aspects Political ecology Scarcity SUBJECT Great Britain -- Colonies -- America -- History Subject America Atlantic Ocean Region England Great Britain Ireland Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780812299557 0812299558

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