The treeless Dutch Republic imported timber from Norway and the Baltic lands, floated rafts down the Rhine from the German princely states, and procured rare species from Java. In England, Queen Elizabeth I banned her own subjects from felling trees within 14 miles of any coast or river bank; Peter the Great followed suit in Russia with similar decrees. Portugal imported timber from Brazil, Spain from southern Italy and, at the time of the Armada, the Baltics. As was often the case with raw matter, the cost of transportation exceeded the production cost. The price of timber delivered to an English port was twenty times higher than its purchase price in the Baltic forests. In the eighteenth century, it took 4,000 oak trunks, or 40 hectares of mature forest, to build a British battleship. Contrary to the ideas of mercantilism, it turned out that building ships in the colonies was cheaper than transporting timber across the ocean. Almost half the Portuguese fleet was built in Brazil, a third of the Spanish fleet in Cuba, and much of the British fleet in India. 10
Firearms intensified the great powers’ dependence on their forests. Making guns and gunpowder required an enormous supply of firewood. The smelting of a ton of iron took 50 cubic metres of firewood, or a year’s growth of 10 hectares of forest, and then the forging process needed charcoal. Deforestation was one of the reasons for the decline of Venice and then of the Ottoman Empire. The abundance of firewood was one of the reasons for the success of metallurgy in Sweden and Russia. The pan-European shift from the Mediterranean to the North Sea followed the exhaustion of the southern forests.
Deforestation of Europe
While a forest stood, it remained subject to multiple ownerships, privileges and rights of use. The right to hunt belonged to the aristocracy, but the locals usually had the right of way through the forest, could collect brushwood, and let their pigs forage for acorns or cattle graze in the woods. 11 Once a forest was felled, the land became private property and could be mortgaged or sold. The spreading of Roman law through the North coincided with forest clearings. Surviving as hunting grounds for the local elite, the remaining forests were turned into enclosed parkland. Long considered a byword for wildness and barbarity, the forest, as the historian Keith Thomas has observed, ‘become an indispensable part of the scenery of upper-class life’. 12
Soldiers, traders and monks kept moving east to discover new lands that seemed to them wild, uninhabited and promising. Mingling with the Slav or Finnish tribes who lived in their native forests, the migrants from the west or the south enticed them into the fur or fish trade and then into farming the cleared lands. The historian Fernand Braudel wrote that the Baltic lands were Europe’s ‘internal Americas’. 13 But most of these lands in the North-East of Europe produced nothing but grain and timber. In Prussia, Russia and the Baltic countries, it took 1.5 hectares of woodland to construct a single farmhouse with a barn, which would last only fifteen years – less time than it took for new pines to grow. For most of this time, the house had to be heated with firewood. The rising price of grain and timber led to a new serfdom: landowners forced the peasants to work in the fields in summer and to fell trees in winter. Transportation costs were often prohibitive. The landowners delivered rye and timber to the nearest harbour. Then foreign ships transported the cargoes, and most of the trading profits went to Dutch and English merchants. 14 Thousands of their ships traded in the Baltic, exchanging iron goods, luxuries and firearms for grain, timber and a few other forest products, such as hemp, beeswax, tar and potash. Until 1760, the Baltic ports exported masts throughout Europe; later, American-sourced masts got their share of the market. Endowed with diffused, labour-intensive commodities, the Baltic lands were dominated by their neighbours who possessed topical resources – silver, iron and specialised labour. It was a colonisation by proxy. Trade was profitable, but landowners captured the rent, and the population of these lands grew more slowly than it would have done had people been left to subsistence farming.
Southern Europe made use of the roads built by the Romans, but in Northern Europe the branching network of rivers played a similar role. Instead of building roads, collecting taxes and investing in land, the Baltic states collected customs duty at river estuaries. Their capital cities grew in these chosen locations. Granaries, sawmills and aristocratic mansions sprang up on the quaysides of Königsberg, Danzig and Riga. Landowners managed their estates, which functioned upstream as colonial plantations, remotely. Brute force was used there to make the peasants work.
Before we harnessed fossil fuels, each European city needed a tract of forest a hundred times larger than its own area. Heated with wood and often built out of wood, growing cities pushed the forests ever further away. A city could replace wood with stone and clay, peat and coal. But clay had to be fired, stone had to be transported, river banks and mine shafts had to be reinforced, and wood was still needed for all these purposes. But the greater part was burnt where it stood, to provide land suitable for planting crops. The woods around Madrid were exhausted – from the seventeenth century onwards, this city had been heated with charcoal, which provides more heat per unit of weight than firewood. Every year thousands of tons of charcoal were produced by burning even more wood and delivered by oxen from provinces up to 50 kilometres away. Less than 7 per cent of the British Isles was covered in woodland, falling to a minimum during the First World War. Even in the departments of northern France, no more than 15 per cent of the territory was covered in forests. Firewood was brought to Paris from up to 200 kilometres away, along canals and the Seine. Each Parisian needed, on average, 2 tons of firewood per year, equivalent to harvesting 1 acre of woodland. If forests were felled and not replanted, then the radius of delivery increased annually. In contrast to that of Paris, the London price of firewood remained stable thanks to the abundance of coal. But the timbering of mines required good quality logs, and they had to be frequently replaced; only a few species – particularly chestnut – did not immediately rot in the mines. Metal smelting needed even more firewood. Charcoal produced a hotter fire than wood, but it needed high-quality wood such as oak. Smelting furnaces were built next to the mines, but these were often in the mountains, and charcoal had to be taken up there on carts. A journey of between 5 and 8 kilometres was viable, but once all the timber within this radius had been felled the mine had to be shut even if there was still ore to be mined. The irony was that timber, not ore, defined the economic geography of the Iron Age.
In the imperial period, the Europeans were as anxious about the disappearance of the old forests as they were delighted about newly discovered ones. Felling and burning woodland, they harnessed enormous expanses of territory from Rome to St Petersburg, and from the Amazon to Siberia. Starting from the west of Europe, the further a traveller went, the more forests he saw. In Prussia about 40 per cent of the land was forested, and the woods in Poland and European Russia still seemed boundless. Discovering new islands and continents, expeditions found woods instead of gold. But you can’t depend on what you destroy; you can’t have your cake and eat it. Our parks – places for relaxation and sites of nostalgia – are great monuments to the vanished forests. The places where we work bear no resemblance to bosky glades, but the places where we choose to relax still look like forests.