The title of Paul Warde's study of wood in the Württemberg Forstamt during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries announces his considerable ambitions. Using the production and consumption of wood in all its forms as his prism, he intends to integrate dynamic ecological conditions, the economic evolution of the region as well as the changing nature of state power into a single narrative. In pursuit of this agenda, Warde has collected and analyzed a tremendous amount of often fascinating information, ranging from the distribution of tree species across the Forstamt to the outcome of court cases about wood theft to the economics of bathhouses, which relied on wood to heat their water. Wood may be his prism, but he focuses it on concerns as diverse as peasant incomes, the consequences of war, and the drafting of ducal forest ordinances. Readers interested in any of these questions will enjoy Warde's work, even though his larger themes—ecology, economy, and the state—sometimes entangle rather than illuminate the flow of his study. Indeed, Warde's struggles with incommensurate literatures and issues illustrate the challenges that interdisciplinary studies—however praiseworthy in principle—often face in practice.

After an introduction that introduces his wide-ranging points of reference and provides a brief history of the Duchy of Württemberg, Warde launches into three long chapters on peasant society, the economy of early modern Württemberg, and the growth of state regulation. Chapters one and two focus on the peasant economy. The specificity of his analysis and the amount of detail he provides is often breathtaking. For example, a two-page table in small print (pp. 48–49) gives the proportion of land dedicated to vineyards, arable land, and meadows in more than fifty villages. Anyone who has worked with sixteenth-century local records, even in famously well-documented Württemberg, knows how difficult such an enterprise is—even if the table, surprisingly, does not tell us how much land was woodland. Building on these labors, Warde makes some significant claims. For example, he asserts that the decline in the Forstamt's vineyards was not correlated with any expansion in arable cultivation or shifts in labor supply, as more deterministic models might assume (p. 93). He also suggests that the region was not near any “ecological limit” even during the population peak before the Thirty Years' War, and that climate change, while significant, was not “the long-run determining factor” in changing the agrarian regime and demographic structure (p. 96). Similarly detailed work on forest ordinances and the politics of wood characterizes chapter three.

Only in chapter four does Warde concentrate exclusively on wood in Württemberg. By dint of exhaustive reflection on where wood came from and where it was consumed, he demonstrates convincingly that the Forstamt, despite its name, suffered from a consistent shortage of wood. Wood production varied considerably in communal and ducal forests, although neither regime produced many large trees. Rather, by establishing organized coppices and by limiting grazing by pigs and other animals, woodland was optimized to produce a steady flow of smaller pieces of wood for fencing, burning, and other uses. By far the largest source of consumption was for energy. In addition to domestic heating, Warde looks into wood use in fencing, artisan production (including smelting, blacksmithing, soap-making, and glassmaking), and in building to reach his balance. The shortfall was filled primarily with wood rafted down the rivers from the Black Forest, where supply remained abundant.

Warde's final chapter, “The Two Ecologies,” seeks to integrate his findings in terms of his larger themes, looking first at resource flows involving wood, then at perceptions of such flows. Rejecting the distinction between “natural” and “market” economies (with their tendency to assign peasants to the former), Warde argues for two ecologies: the territorial and the transformational. Drawing on systems theory, he defines the territorial ecology as including actions that reinforced the integrity of specific existing patterns—for example, the ban on removing biomass from village territories by exporting straw, wood, or dung. Transformatory flows are those that disrupt local patterns at some scale, which may lead to a shift in the scale of territorial ecologies. Warde's approach can thus take into account political and cultural as well as economic considerations, leaving motivation aside in favor of analyzing the shifting flows that produced wealth or poverty, power or helplessness in his region. His analysis thus allows him to portray a complex, multipolar, and shifting system of wood production and consumption that simultaneously reinforced local autarky and tied Württemberg villages to larger economic and political systems. At the scale of the Forstamt, Warde's approach gives a nuanced picture of the kind that can provide an essential backstop for “big-picture” models of economic and ecological change. As a contribution to such larger issues directly, however, the book is less successful. Between the complexity of the underlying issues and literatures and the book's haphazard editing and sometimes less-than-lucid prose, anyone not already deeply engaged in these problems is unlikely to come away much the wiser. We should look forward to Warde's future writing, though, to articulate more convincingly the grand synthesis he is striving for.