Guarding the colonial woodlands: A genealogy of forest conservation discourses in late Bourbon's period in new Spain (Mexico)

Abstract

Facing a dramatic depletion of forests in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, throughout the last decades of colonial rule (between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) the Bourbon administration wrote and published a considerable number of laws, reports, surveys, and ordinances on forest management and conservation. In this paper we examine discourses of forest conservation and the measures applied to preserve this critical resource by colonial official and experts. Drawing on forest laws, ordinances, and reports from national archives in Mexico City, we argue that conservation became part of the concepts which defined how forests were conceptualized and managed, but also that conservation was intrinsic to colonial processes of state-making and territorialization. This paper aims to approach Bourbon officials’ understanding of conservation as a complex interrelation between renewed discourses of nature and the practices of colonial forest administration through the idea of indeterminacy. Likewise, it sheds light on patterns that have defined the ways in which forest conservation has been constituted in modern Mexico, addressing a little-studied period in forest management in this country.