No Wood, No Kingdom

”[An] impressive history…No Wood, No Kingdom tells complex stories about the connections between Atlantic ecologies, introducing a vital sense of contingency rather than inevitability. In doing so, it opens up urgent questions about how scarcity, the state, conservation, commerce, and colonialism interacted to transform environments at the dawn of English empire.” - Journal of British Studies

“No Kingdom is an impressive investigation of the reality behind the rhetoric of scarcity in early modern England and its effect on Britain’s first colonies.” - Daniel Mandell, Journal of American History

“No Wood, No Kingdom is a triumph of Atlantic environmental history. This book fits into an emerging body of scholarship on environmental history across vast early America [and]… is indispensable for scholars of the early English Atlantic, environmental history, and historical political ecology.” - H-Early America

“Pluymers demonstrates dedicated historical research throughout and manages to humanize historical figures while writing in the objective fashion of a responsible researcher….[A]n admirably nuanced work of political ecology and environmental history.” - Global Maritime History

“[T]his book 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.” - Labour/Le Travail

“In this welcome study of early modern English forestry and the ‘wooden world’ it sustained, Keith Pluymers uses the ‘political ecology’ of wood as a lens with which to examine the problem of how and why the English kingdom became an Atlantic political society during the seventeenth century…The substantial achievement of seeing Atlantic society as a whole in ecological terms highlights the value of an approach based on ‘political ecology.’” - Agricultural History

“No Wood, No Kingdom represents a major addition to the growing body of literature on the nexus of labor, technology, and environment in the early modern Atlantic World. By illuminating the experiences of diverse participants-including Royal foresters, naval officials, timber speculators, planters, enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and indigenous peoples-the book offers a compelling analysis of English efforts to control and manage forests and vital timber reserves in Ireland, Virginia, New England, and the Caribbean. The writing is refreshingly robust, explicating complex ideas in clear, brisk language. Essential reading to understand the profound human and ecological impacts of colonization during the ‘age of timber.’” - Jennifer Anderson, author of Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America

“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] will especially interest scholars working on environmental, imperial, and Atlantic histories.” - Joe Borsato, Ethnohistory

Keith Pluymers is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University.

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