No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)

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 pra