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Reviews
A useful work for upper-level students doing in-depth research.
The work of Karl Appuhn, based on extensive archival research and rich technical insights, offers a major study devoted to the social, economic, administrative, and political aspects of Venetian forest management.
Magisterial.
A wonderful study of Venetian politics, natural knowledge, resource management, and bureaucratic development.
With this splendid and painstakingly researched volume, Appuhn is sure to inspire others to the view that nature is to be honored and respected, managed if necessary, but not merely there for human taking.
A must-have. Richly illustrated, highly readable, and filled with fascinating detail, this book should also enjoy a far wider readership among Pacific, colonial, and natural historians alike.
Appuhn blazes a trail where others may very usefully follow.
This remarkable book contains many fascinating details.
Karl Appuhn’s study of Venetian efforts to control and manage their forests is a fascinating case study in the problems and politics of resource management. By carefully tracing the evolution of Venice’s attempts to control, harvest, and replenish its forests, Appuhn reconstructs a world of experts, bureaucrats, shipbuilders, and rural villagers who all recognized how vital a commodity trees were to an early modern state. An excellent and stimulating contribution to early environmental history.
An extraordinary book that offers a fresh perspective to see Venice anew in both its materialist and ideological manifestations. Beyond Venice, it challenges readers to rethink a number of issues of broad interest to early modern history in general: state bureaucracies and economy, the production and reproduction of knowledge, and the relationship between humans and nature in theory and practice.
Takes environmental history into the streets and countryside of the Renaissance city-state. Appuhn brilliantly reveals how Venetian political anxieties yielded a remarkable system of forest conservation to promote civic virtue and regional governance. In the interplay between Venice’s crowded lagoons and sylvan hillsides, he overturns the old story of European scientific rationalism as the death of nature. An original and important work.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
376
ISBN
9780801892615
Illustration Description
9 halftones, 3 line drawings, 1 map
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Note on Dates
Introduction
States, Economies, and Nature
Chronology
1. Forest Exploitation before the Venetian Conquest
Venetian Demand for Forest Products
Regional
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Note on Dates
Introduction
States, Economies, and Nature
Chronology
1. Forest Exploitation before the Venetian Conquest
Venetian Demand for Forest Products
Regional Forest Ecologies and the Venetian Timber Supply
Local Practices of Forest Exploitation and Venetian Shortages
Perceived Shortages and the Emergence of the Market Hierarchy
2. The Venetian Discovery of Mainland Forests
Water Management and Venetian Interpretations of Mainland Landscapes
Local Property Rights and the Limits of Venetian Power to Preserve Forests
The Failure of Market Regulations
3. Venetian Forestry Laws and the Creation of Public Forest Reserves
The Creation of the Boschi Pubblici
The 1476 Forestry Laws and the Hierarchy of Forest Utilization
The Cambrai Crisis, Fiscal Reform, and the Expansion of the State Reserves
The Expansion of Forestry Legislation and Its Consequences
4. The Venetian Forest Bureaucracy
A Divided Bureaucracy
A New Role for the Provveditori alle Legne
Sixteenth-Century Forest Surveys
Harvests, Local Resistance, and Perceptions of Scarcity
The Catastico Garzoni and the Knowledge Gap
5. The Preservation and Reproduction of BureaucraticKnowledge
Venetian Bureaucratic Expertise
The Cadastral Surveys and the Preservation of Collective Knowledge
The Cadastral Surveys as Natural Historical Narrative
Topographical Maps and the Reproduction of Knowledge
6. Nature's Republic or Republican Nature?
Peak Demand and Peak Anxiety in Eighteenth-CenturyVenice
Institutional Reform and the Res Publica of Forests
The Venetian Moral Economy of Nature
Venetian Discourses in a European Context
Conclusion
The Three Trials of Pietro Gavardo
Finding Meaning in the Forest
Appendix
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
