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Book Review
| Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany. By Paul Warde. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 392. Maps, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $99.00.
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| The Cambridge historian Paul Warde has written "a book about the state and the material world" (p. 3). Studies analyzing the operation of state, he argues, often focused on "immaterial" aspects, such as authority, divinity, sovereignty, or community. But the exercise of power always was linked to material things, be it resources, be it land. "The relevance and power of the immaterial rested upon its intersection with the material realities of existence" (p. 3). No historian will deny this assumption—particularly no one doing environmental history. Unlike studies concentrating either on the state's influence on the material world or on different types of states being shaped by different environmental settings, Warde claims to combine these two well-established perspectives to one new. |
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The major issues analyzed in this book are at the same time major issues of European constitutional, economic, and environmental history in the early modern era: the making of the modern state and the economy of preindustrial societies in the "wooden age" within the solar energy regime. Warde's study is influenced by Rainer Beck's approach to the "natural economy" of early modern agrarian societies and by the work of David Sabean. Much emphasis is laid on the interconnection of social structures and hierarchies with the control over natural resources. Unlike Beck, Warde does not choose the micro level of one village as unit of analysis, but the wider regional focus of the "Forstamt Leonberg"—a district of forest administration in the south German dukedom of Wurttemberg. Thus, he succeeds in making substantial contributions to many well-known historiographical debates on topics as the timber famine, the (un-)tragic history of the commons and the environmental and social reality of Malthusian concepts. |
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Paul Warde does not accept the common dichotomy between communal economy thought as self-sufficient local agro-ecosystems on the one side and the superregional market on the other. He sketches a system of "two ecologies," an "ecology of integrity" and an "ecology of disturbance" being intersected in multiple ways. The methodological option for following these intersections is the reconstruction of resource flows. Based on a broad selection of archival sources, such as tax records, administrative surveys, and account books, Warde is doing a great job in quantifying agricultural productivity, wood consumption, trade goods, and imported natural resources. He reconstructs land use patterns and land coverage as well as demographic change. Warde shows strong communes running an efficient common management system of land use and resource access over the centuries, thus adding an important perspective to the historical debate following Garrett Hardin's rather ahistoric assumptions about the workings of commons. |
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Warde correctly points out the importance of wood as a primary resource and woodland as an indispensable part of early modern agro-ecosystems. However, one wonders why Warde pays little attention to one of the main usages of the woodlands, hunting, both on a topical and a methodological level. The author states that hunting "had little if anything to do with 'state formation'" (p. 211). Yet the conflicts regarding hunting and damages to agricultural production caused by wildlife and the debates and reality of poaching ("environmental banditry," as Carl Jacoby puts it) could have merited more discussion. When Warde discusses historical wildlife reports, he does not analyze this type of source as critically as he does in other cases of land use. Here he could have reflected on the examples from Württemberg discussed by the state minister Rudolf V. Wagner more than one hundred years ago. |
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These critical remarks should not detract from the impressive scope of this study. Based on the detailed analysis of a broad range of sources and secondary works, Warde has presented a study of importance far beyond the history of Wuerttemberg. At any time the results of his regional case study are discussed within the context of the major historiographical debates—such as on early modern state formation or the preindustrial "natural economy." His work is an excellent contribution to the research done on the political, social, economic, and environmental history of early modern Europe. |
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Martin Knoll is assistant professor for early modern history at the University of Regensburg (Germany). |
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