Keith Pluymers, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

This book brings an important new perspective and a lot of archival research to an old topic. The rise of ironworking in England put new pressure on the long-term sustainability of English forests. The kingdom relied on the navy to preserve its sovereignty, so the possibility of a scarcity of shipbuilding timber created concern and shaped the political ecology of the early modern period. The actual crisis never materialized, and the navy shipyards continued to find domestic supplies of oak and other essential timber. At the same time, the pressure on the forests was real, and British ports turned to Norway for increasing quantities of construction timber during the 17th and 18th centuries.

The 17th century also saw the English extend their imperial reach in Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean. Pluymers shows how boosters looking to increase government support and investment in overseas colonies tried to capitalize on the endemic concern about forests in England. Following two chapters on England and Ireland, his book details efforts to promote forest industries in Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados. The Irish chapter includes a well-researched analysis of the pressure ironworks created in County Waterford. Individuals interested in promoting Virginian forests saw the same threats of scarcity in Ireland and argued that this closer island could not solve England’s problems.

Pluymers uses a political ecology framework to explore the interplay between ideas about forest scarcity and abundance and the ecological realities of English, Irish, and overseas forests. He generally finds the rhetoric was shaped by ideas more than the material reality of forests. In Virginia, forest composition and Indigenous resistance often complicated the easy extraction of useful strategic forest resources. Where boosters saw abundance, settlers found forests without the destiny of pine trees needed to produce naval stores (tar and turpentine) or mulberry trees to support silk production. The Virginian forests also proved to be dangerous contested territory as the Powhatans resisted further settler incursion into their territory. The first attempt to start an ironworks also ended quickly in failure. The abundant Atlantic forest, at first glance, looked like an obvious solution to the timber crisis in England, but in the decades that followed, the crisis in England failed to materialize fully, and bringing together the labour and resources in Virginia proved difficult. Two centuries later, North Carolina’s longleaf pine forests became a global centre in naval store production and the British turned to their remaining colonial forests for large quantities of timber. But in both cases, it took the mass migration of labour from overseas: African slaves in North Carolina and free but often impoverished immigrants in the Province of Canada and New Brunswick.

Bermuda and Barbados provide different case studies, with more success in developing commercial activities in their forests in Bermuda and attention to the noncommercial value of trees and forests in Barbados. That said, they were no more successful at solving England’s timber scarcity problems, as the luxury timbers and dyed woods were not interchangeable with the British oak or Scots pine.

The concluding chapter returns to England and the debates over timber scarcity, with a particular focus on John Evelyn’s Sylva published in 1670. Evelyn, like many of the other sources used by Pluymers in the book, “deployed the idea of scarcity to advance his vision for the best uses of England’s woods.” (237) But Sylva also supported the idea of relying on Virginia to help offset some of the pressure on domestic woods, reminding us that intellectuals were already thinking about the possibility of using the empire to overcome ecological limits long before Ricardo grappled with the land constraints in the early 19th century or Georg Borgström coined the phrase “ghost acreage” during the middle of the 20th century.

While Pluymers provides a detailed exploration of case studies exploring why ideas of turning to the Atlantic forest to solve the timber shortages in England failed during the 17th century, the English did turn to Norway and Baltic ports during the early modern period. The northern European timber trade reminds us that while the timber famine never created a serious security crisis, Great Britain’s forests were depleted to the point the island needed to import growing quantities of construction timber. The coverage of the book would have been even more impressive if it included a chapter on Norway, but that would be a lot to ask of a book that already covers three overseas colonies along with England and Ireland. There were a few other opportunities to better connect the depths of research in this book with the wider historiography in environmental and economic history in the introduction and maybe in a standalone conclusion. But none of this takes away from the contributions of this book that expertly links the history of concerns about timber scarcity with English dreams about the value of the Atlantic empire during the 17th century. Readers interested in both the Atlantic World, ideas of scarcity and cornucopianism, ecological imperialism, and forests in the English Atlantic will find this book very useful.

Jim Clifford

University of Saskatchewan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v90.0031.