No Wood, No Kingdom

Despite the stark alternatives of its title, No Wood, No Kingdom presents an extraordinarily varied political ecology of the nascent English/British Atlantic, composed of Great Britain, Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados.To an extent that defies synthesis, conflicts over wood arose in every context, so "political ecology-ideas and practices governing the definition and use of natural resources" (p.4)-was more political than ecological.What was "wood"?It could be types of spaces such as royal forests, parklands, hunting grounds, and insurgents' refuges.It could be a raw material for commercial and industrial purposes: bark, pipe/barrel staves, charcoal, naval stores of ships' timbers and tar, and mulberry leaves for silkworms.It could define rural landscapes: windbreaks, boundary trees, and hedges.It could be a commodity: cedar, mahogany, and dyewoods.It provided domestic subsistence: household fuel, coppice, thatch, lumber, fruit, and common rights to windfalls.In England royal forests predominated.Surveyors were supposed to protect hunting grounds and enhance the forests' beauty.But they were also supposed to produce income for the Crown, which often called for "disafforestation" (alienating royal forests), while, contradictorily, they had to maintain the forests' sustainability and allow for common rights to gather household supplies.In the country at large woods were threatened by enclosure, industrial depletion, and erosion.England's woods could sustainably grow about one cubic meter per person per year, one of the lowest ratios in northern Europe.Wood's scarcity was taken for granted.Ireland had no royal forests, but it had lots of woods.The main theme was deforestation: to deprive unruly Irish "woodkerns" (p.62) of their synonymous refuges, and to promote English plantations.Individual planters enjoyed practically unregulated use of their woodlands, which were primarily considered as wasteland; state purposes such as royal revenues and naval stores had no priority.Deforestation provided one-time profits from naval timbers, pipe staves, and charcoal.Thereafter, land's enduring value lay in agriculture, for which deforestation was a precondition, with minor exceptions for hunting and pasturage.Virginia's promotors initially promised that its abundant woods would alleviate English scarcity.But timber from Virginia raised weaker commercial expectations than dreams of mulberry trees and silkworms.Gigantic ironworks were another failed project, despite the availability of waterpower, bog iron

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