Uprooting the forest: timber surveying and state formation in the British Atlantic, 1608-1806

Thesis

This thesis argues that surveyors and surveys were key to state forestry schemes in Britain’s early modern Atlantic empire. By studying colonial state forestry schemes in situ from 1608 to 1806, from their beginnings in England and Ireland, to their application in New England, and culmination in Nova Scotia, this thesis offers a diachronic analysis of forestry surveying as an exercise in state formation, with implications for understandings of British imperial governance, and surveys as part of administrative practice.

Forestry surveyors were both practitioners of traditional resource management and professionals at the cutting edge of technology, low level functionaries and powerful state agents. Their surveys were highly flexible administrative tools that could adapt to reflect changing metropolitan visions for empire, the experiences of the practitioners who fashioned them, and the realities of the landscapes they scrutinised. The technical development of surveying was not an inevitable march toward the cartographic form – forestry surveys reached their greatest administrative potential when maps were tamed down to strictly utilitarian ends, supplemented by textual surveys, tables, the activities of surveyors in the field, and adjacent legal structures.

Yet surveys were not all-powerful – in practice they simply communicated ambition rather than creating material change on the ground. Circumstance, not technological sophistication, dictated the success of surveying projects – only when land unencumbered by preexisting titles or property systems was transferred en-masse to politically weak, smallholding settlers could the state reshape landholding to suit its resource needs. This thesis uses both these structural limitations, and the examples of state forestry projects to characterise British imperial governance, arguing that interventionism had always been an aspiration of the metropole, but that it materialised more prominently in the later eighteenth century because conquest, population transfers, deliberate policy structuring, and political exigency created the necessary circumstances for it to flourish.

Authors: Lees, JG

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aey8zeova
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: history of cartography; administrative history; environmental history; forestry surveying; imperial history
• Subjects: History; Forest surveys