No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic

Abstract

In No Wood, No Kingdom, Keith Pluymers demonstrates that, over the course of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, gaps between the perceptions and realities of wood scarcity led to contradictory claims about resource availability in the English Atlantic. Pluymers focuses on the role of political ecology, which refers to ideas and practices governing resource use, in shaping imperial expansion. In contesting the “windfall” thesis, or the notion that domestic deforestation impelled the English to expand into the Atlantic basin, Pluymers argues that political ecology in the English Atlantic was characterized by uncertainty due to challenges in defining resource prevalence, regulating the movement of timber, and acquiring accurate information for imperial and commercial interests (9–10, 237). Through an examination of promotional tracts, administrative documents, maps, and forestry regulations in England, Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados, Pluymers paints an insightful picture of officials, foresters, and colonists struggling over questions of land and resource use.The book is organized into five core chapters, not including the introduction or the concluding sixth chapter, with each chapter covering political ecology in distinct geographical spaces. Chapter 1 analyzes the Tudor and Stuart forestry reforms that sought to maximize the valuation of Crown lands through surveying as the kingdom tried to balance the revenue generated from timber leases with local needs (58). In chapter 2, Pluymers shows how the English went from promoting Irish woodlands as places of abundance in the 1580s to the 1630s when the fear that English forests were full of waste prompted closer scrutiny of Irish woods, but by then the Crown had already overzealously granted woodland leases such that royal access to Irish forests was limited (105). Similarly, in chapter 3, Virginia Company promoters initially encouraged a vision of abundance but, when faced with actually governing the Tsenacommacah woods, they tried to forge commercial and material connections with England by using the woods to sustain sericulture and ironworks, which ultimately failed following the 1622 Algonquian attack on Jamestown (128). Chapter 4 turns to Bermuda, where, despite many challenges, Bermudan trees became key to the colony’s early economy and the subject of the 1622 Orders and Constitutions that enacted a conservationist regime on the island (138). In chapter 5, Pluymers argues that environmental degradation on Barbados did not occur because of ecological illiteracy but because the colony’s political ecology shifted in the mid-seventeenth century from protectionism to privileging profits from sugarcane plantations (170). Chapter 6 situates John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664) within these Atlantic discourses of uncertainty to underscore the persistence of scarcity anxieties.Pluymers succeeds at uncovering a range of competing and frustrated political ecologies that existed in the English Atlantic. One of the strongest sections of the book is in Pluymers’s analysis of English maps of Irish forests, which revealed their struggles with documenting the Irish landscape (67–73). Another intriguing aspect is that many colonists relied on Indigenous, African, and Afro-Caribbean experts for ecological knowledge to protect resources in the colonies (110, 166, 189). While the book’s focus on particular places is one of its strengths, one difficulty of the colony-by-colony approach is that it inadvertently reinforces spatial separation by making readers deliberate on the book’s themes across distinct geographical regions. For instance, the tension between the resource interests of colonists and the central government emerges as a key theme throughout (88, 178) but is never really highlighted for the reader. Nonetheless, the book is both timely and contributes to a growing scholarly examination of the disjunction between knowledge and practice in the early modern world. It will especially interest scholars working on environmental, imperial, and Atlantic histories.