The early modern period has aptly been called the “wooden age,” when timber, directly or indirectly, provided most of the material underpinnings of European and other societies. Most scholars who have been interested in wood as a historical problem have approached it from the perspective of historical geography or landscape. In this new book, Paul Warde analyzes the economic and political dimensions of timber in early modern Germany. Focusing on the relatively small Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, Warde uses timber as a way to both map out the material constraints of life in early modern communities, and to undertake an analysis of state development that moves away from abstract categories such as sovereignty and authority, and toward the concrete problems faced by rulers and bureaucrats as they sought to regulate crucial aspects of everyday life. In so doing, Warde seeks to situate local and regional communities within a well-defined ecological context so as to understand better the kinds of economic choices that early modern Europeans, like other pre-modern people, faced. This is something that environmental historians like to talk about at great length, even though they often neglect it in practice. To his credit, Warde puts his analysis where his mouth is.

The book is divided into five long chapters, each organized around a particular theme. In the first chapter Warde sets the stage for all that follows by bringing to life the real constraints of the photosynthetic economy. Having established the basic material facts of life in early modern Württemberg, he then goes on to examine the role that property distribution, state efforts at regulation, and economic pressures on the forest played in the regional economy. In the final chapter he assembles all of the preceding analysis into an argument about what he calls the “two ecologies” of early modern Europe. These are a “territorial ecology” grounded in the energy requirements of local communities, and a “transformatory ecology” shaped by the state's ability to promote and regulate commodity flows across larger regions. This is a useful model for thinking about environmental history because it escapes the trap of thinking only in terms of local ecologies. As Warde makes clear, no early modern European community, however small, was an ecological island, and even local ecological histories need to be understood within larger spatial contexts of commodity flows and energy transfers.

As befits a work of forest history, Warde covers a substantial period, ranging from the mid-fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Because he has (rightly in this reviewer's opinion) chosen a thematic approach, each chapter contains some jarring juxtapositions. He can sometimes move forward a century or more and then back again in the space of two paragraphs. Some readers may find this difficult to accept. However, a chronological approach, while making for a more satisfying narrative, would not have allowed Warde to make his larger argument about the crucial points of intersection between the state and the material world.