We tend to think of environmental history as inherently transnational; nature has no respect for national boundaries, as the spread of pollutants, invasive species, and climate change has shown. Yet, nation-states have had a profound influence on their local environments, perhaps nowhere more obviously than in forestry. This volume seeks to overcome the long-dominant tendency to view forestry through the lens of the nation-state. This is no easy task, as the scholarship is oriented toward the state for a reason: states often pioneered the introduction of forestry. Indeed, the national traditions of forest history require this to be an edited collection, with specialists penning chapters on the development of state forestry in nine countries across the northern tier of Europe, from Britain to Poland. But by juxtaposing the histories of state forestry throughout much of northern Europe, Oosthoek and Hölzl seek to bring together the kaleidoscope of state policies into a more coherent whole.

Not surprising, the story of state forestry generally begins with the period of early modern state formation. Brend-Stefan Grewe and Richard Hölzl, in their chapter on the German lands, demonstrate the central role of states in implementing forest ordinances in the sixteenth century in an effort to address shortages of certain types of timber. A key strategy involved limiting peasant use rights to the forest, a common theme of legislation from across early modern northern Europe. The Enlightenment reinforced this trend. Cameralist states sponsored the first wave of scientific forestry scholarship in the mid-eighteenth century, with the aim of discovering the best means of ensuring a large and sustainable timber harvest. These scholars all agreed that isolating forest trees from competition (forest undergrowth, grazing livestock, peasant woodcutters, etc.) facilitated maximum timber yield. Many German states owned large tracts of forest that supplied significant state revenue, and increasing the timber harvest served their interests. This classical forestry tradition influenced other northern European lands to a greater or lesser extent up to the late twentieth century.

Although early modern northern European states sought to address timber shortages through state forestry, the story unfolds differently in different regions. In Britain, for instance, local resistance to a 1698 act of parliament placed significant limitations on the expansion of the Forest of Dean. Similar resistance in the Netherlands led to a ban on the state acquiring wastes for reforestation. As maritime powers with easy access to cheap Baltic and Rhenish timber, financial incentives for forestry, whether state or private, were generally weak. As a result, state forestry emerged very late in liberal northwestern Europe: in 1899 in the Netherlands and 1919 in Britain. Jan Oosthoek, in separate chapters on both of these countries, shows that the impulse to state forestry came as the result of crises. The Netherlands struggled against spreading landscapes of heather and sand dunes that market forces failed to contain, whereas Britain, which imported 92 percent of its timber, faced a serious emergency with the disruption of trade routes during World War I. These crises helped these states overcome resistance to state forestry and brought them in line with continental trends.

As the case of Britain suggests, warfare played a major role in establishing and expanding the state's influence in forestry. In 1558, Sweden's Gustav I claimed all oak trees in the country for ship construction, laying the foundations for Sweden's rise as a naval power in the coming century. Indeed, the wars of the seventeenth century produced a wave of military-driven state forestry measures. As Bo Fritzbøger explains, Denmark's loss of forest-rich lands to Sweden in 1660 led the following year to the appointment of Vincents Joachim Hahn, who actively expanded state control of forests. (Likewise, the Napoleonic Wars and Denmark's loss of timber-rich Norway in 1815 led to a renewed wave of state forestry in the nineteenth century.) The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the same period led the Royal Society in Britain to commission John Evelyn's forestry handbook, Sylva (1664), while, across the Channel in France, Jean-Baptiste Colbert's forest ordinance of 1669 established oak plantations for the French fleet. Whereas the naval wars of the late seventeenth century led to increasing pressure on forests in Western Europe and Scandinavia, the Thirty Years' War had the opposite effect on Central Europe. As Grewe and Hölzl point out, the slaughter of roughly a third of the region's population meant less demand on expanding forests; as a result, concern with sustainable timber production did not reemerge in the German lands until the eighteenth century.

From the early modern period through the nineteenth century, northern Europe saw a diversity of approaches to forestry, but, by the second half of the twentieth century, state policies began to converge. The Germans’ ruthless exploitation of forests from the Netherlands to Poland and beyond during World War II, along with rising labor costs and a postwar building boom, led to large-scale conifer plantations, harvested by mechanized clear-cutting, in the 1950s and 1960s, as several of the chapters discuss. Indeed, European states showed an increasing uniformity in their approach to forestry in the twentieth century (even across the Iron Curtain), driven by similar economic needs and common sylvacultural knowledge. Likewise, northern European countries have recently begun to turn, largely in tandem, towards post-productive forestry, with an emphasis on environmental services and recreation. Several of the contributions to the volume identify the 1992 Rio Declaration as a critical milestone on the road to more environmentally sustainable forestry practices. The major exception to this trend is Poland, where, as Anna Majchrowska indicates, the current government has begun to reject such international agreements in favor of the local logging industry. After years of convergence, new political divides between populist nationalists and liberal internationalists are emerging in Europe that might shape forests for years to come.

Although the nation-state tradition of forest history makes clear the influence of governments over their environments, this volume allows us to consider the ways in which diverse environments helped shape northern European states. This is most obvious in the case of Sweden. In their contribution, Per Eliasson and Erik Törnlund outline the differences between forestry policies applied to the cultural landscapes of southern Sweden, and those to the thinly populated forest frontier of the north. Similar dynamics appear in Norway and Finland. Likewise, one wonders whether environmental and geographical factors contributed to a more laissez-faire attitude to nature in the Netherlands and Britain. Mild climates and relatively flat terrains meant less need for forest environmental services; excellent water transport meant easy access to timber imports from the Baltic and the Rhine. And, while early German artisans wrung their hands about access to firewood for metalworking—justifying state forest conservation—English coalmines liberated their craftsmen of such worries. Consequently, nature made it easy for the British and the Dutch to satisfy their needs through market forces, but made state intervention important in the German lands.

The juxtaposition of these cases from across northern Europe allows for fruitful comparisons and reflection on the evolution of states and their forests in the modern period. Because the essays sometimes take significantly different approaches to their topics, it would have been useful if the authors had collaborated more closely, but the editors' concluding essay does a a good job of drawing the articles together. Overall, this is a valuable work for those interested in forest history and environmental studies.