Paul Warde. Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 320 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-83192-5.

Reviewed by Christopher Close (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Published on H-German (February, 2007)

Ecology and State-Building in the Wooden Age

It is hard to overestimate wood's importance in early modern society. It provided heat, light, and energy. It served as the primary construction material for housing, shipbuilding, and numerous other goods essential to daily life. Given wood's central place in pre-industrial Europe, it is not surprising that historians have studied the forest in great detail. Nonetheless, few attempts have been made to situate the use of specific stretches of woodland in the larger development of the early modern economy. Paul Warde's book examines the importance of woodland management, both for the economic history of early modern Germany and for the formation of the modern state. His conclusions call for scholars to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize human interaction with the physical environment.

Warde opens by asserting that the material world established the framework for the rise of the modern state. To test this thesis, he focuses on the relationship between ecology, economy, and state formation in the duchy of Württemberg. Defining ecology as a system comprising both humans and their environment, Warde takes issue with interpretative models that separate humans from their physical surroundings. He portrays the two as interdependent, with changes in the environment reshaping the options available to humans and vice versa. This relationship forms the crux of Warde's argument, and it lies at the heart of his first chapter examining "the peasant dynamic" in early modern Württemberg. For Warde, the peasantry was limited by the cycle of food production. In good crop years, food was cheap, which brought little profit. In bad growing seasons, all members of society suffered from the shortage, meaning peasants could not reap the benefits of higher prices. They were forced to turn to "outside" agents like lords, a circumstance that left peasants open to exploitation. These parameters defined the peasant economy, although they were far from static. Overgrazing, exhaustion of manure supplies, and the sustainability of woodlands were all considerations peasants had to balance in their economic actions. Village and government officials responded by creating rural and woodland "spaces" governed by specific sets of rules. Many of these regulations proved difficult to enforce, especially in wooded areas, which led to competing claims for land use. Nevertheless, all parties involved recognized regulation as a necessity, and Warde concludes that "it was not the area of woodland that varied over time, but the quantity and quality of resources that could be obtained from it" (p. 84). Indeed, Warde argues that Württemberg's inhabitants did not use all of the region's labor effectively, which meant the duchy never reached its "ecological limit" during the early modern period.

Warde expands on this conclusion in chapter 2 by focusing on the social stratification of rural society. He is especially interested in how the village commune and its court regulated rural life. Warde sees the commune and its "regulative drive" as major reasons for the relative stability of the region over his period of study. The commune was particularly important for wood management, since communes owned the majority of woodland. Most rural inhabitants were peasant farmers or day laborers, although a substantial minority also worked as artisans and vinedressers. Warde makes a point of highlighting the importance of multiple sources of income to most households in the region, many of which came into contact with systems of poor relief. Wood was a particularly coveted resource in times of dearth and judicious distribution by local officials could offset wage disparities between different segments of the population. Accordingly, the author maintains, "communal property holding and discretionary decision-making could prove very advantageous to the poor" (p. 160). Warde shows that this picture remained remarkably stable from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, revealing a consistency in the regional economy despite the religio-political upheavals of the times.

In chapter 3, Warde takes up "the regulative drive" behind early modern state formation. The sixteenth century witnessed an increase in the amount of regulation applied to woodlands, which scholars have traditionally seen as evidence of decreasing wood supplies caused by a population outgrowing its natural resources. One of Warde's main goals is to complicate this image of a chronic "wood shortage" and he begins building his case in this chapter by examining state intervention in village life. One of the most direct ways such action occurred was through the expansion of Württemberg's forestry administration, the institution in charge of regulating the duchy's woodlands. The activity of the central government paralleled the desire of communes to regulate their own woodlands at the local level. For Warde, this state of affairs implies a fluid relationship between "center and periphery" in which initiatives from ducal foresters could influence communal legislation and vice versa. Hostility towards the central government focused primarily on hunting and game laws, not on woodland regulation as such, which peasants saw as necessary. Nevertheless, Württemberg's subjects expected flexibility from forest officials, a fact reflected in complaints about foresters who enforced laws strictly without consideration for local circumstances. Warde concludes that the state in early modern Württemberg succeeded in embedding itself in society, but its operation still depended on the cooperation and consensus of the governed.

Warde returns to the idea that a "wood shortage" existed during the early modern period in chapter 4. He argues that the supply of different types of wood could vary considerably, meaning that a surplus of fuel wood could coexist with a local scarcity of mature timber for building. Wood shortage was real, but "it was also situation-specific" (p. 228). Forest policy evolved out of a dialogue between government officials and subjects that created "a woodmanship that was broadly understood and accepted by all" (p. 228). This is Warde's most impressive chapter and one of his most important conclusions. He casts a wide net to incorporate sources beyond forest ordinances such as forest surveys, administrative records, court records and account books. He shows that demand from the market required not just any wood, but different types of wood for specific purposes. While the general supply of wood may have been stable, specific types of timber did enter periods of crisis and shortage. Despite this, Warde finds no evidence that the acreage of woodland or the ideas behind its governance changed to any large extent during the early modern period. The existence of a "wood crisis," therefore, was a contingent matter dependent on local access to specific types of wood.

In his fifth and final chapter, Warde investigates how notions of entitlement to wood shaped relations in early modern Germany. This chapter represents Warde's attempt at methodological innovation by developing an idea of "two ecologies." Rather than employing a model of "natural" and "market" economies, the author advances the "two ecologies" as a new way of viewing "operations that give rise to social and environmental structures." He terms these ecologies "territorial" and "transformational." The "territorial ecology implies a repeatable set of actions happening at a particular place. It is a process that reinforces the 'integrity' of a particular way of doing things." By contrast, a "transformational ecology" must eventually "result in the disturbance of local processes" (pp. 283-284). For Warde, these two ecologies, one focused on the local and the other on the supraregional level, existed side-by-side in a "symbiotic" relationship. The "territorial ecology" allowed for "the transfer of biomass from the woodland to the field," while the "transformational ecology" brought products like salt and iron to the settlements of Württemberg (p. 319). Conflicts over the allocation of wood, as well as woodland crime, were often associated with an upsetting of this equilibrium, most notably in times of crisis caused by bad grape harvests. In this environment, the competing claims of different parties sought to preserve a current or perceived balance of forces in society. As Warde puts it, "just as wood was imported from elsewhere so that locally matters could stay as they were, crime was often an attempt to maintain stability, not undermine it" (p. 329). Arguments over woodland rights allowed the central state to expand its authority as an impartial arbiter while simultaneously enabling central officials to claim authority for the "common good." In this way, state formation coincided with ongoing disputes over rights of pasture and wood usage in the German southwest.

Warde's volume is impressively researched, albeit overly long and somewhat dry at points. Several sections could have used judicious paring to make the author's main argument clearer and more forceful. The chapters also feel slightly divorced from each other, despite scattered attempts in the text to cross-reference. This problem is especially evident when Warde posits his idea of the "two ecologies," which does not appear until the book's final chapter and could have been developed much earlier. Stylistic quibbles aside, this book represents an important effort to re-evaluate the relationship between human beings and their material environment. Warde's dichotomy of the "two ecologies" may be too binary for some, but his call for more detailed analysis of the principles of early modern economic activity on the local level is well taken. Ultimately, Warde's insistence that humans be studied as part of an ecological system, rather than in opposition to or separate from their environment, is this book's most lasting and important contribution.

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Citation: Christopher Close. Review of Warde, Paul, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12898

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