Roots of Sustainability in the Iberian Empires

Shipbuilding and Forestry, 14th - 19th Centuries

Koldo Trapaga Monchet, Álvaro Aragón-Ruano, Cristina Joanaz de Melo, Koldo Trapaga Monchet, Álvaro Aragón-Ruano, Cristina Joanaz de Melo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032313375
• eBook ISBN: 9781000892093
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book sheds light on the roots of sustainability in the Iberian Peninsula that lie in the interrelations between shipbuilding and forestry from the 14th to the 19th centuries, combining various geographical scales (local, regional and national) and different timespans (short-term and long-term studies).

Three main themes are discussed in depth here: firstly, the roots of current conservationism in the Iberian Peninsula; the evolution of the forest policies set in motion at local, regional and national levels to meet the demand for wood and timber; and the long-standing impact of naval empirical forestry on the conservation and transformation of the forest landscape. Therefore, the book attempts, on the one hand, to unravel the forest policies and empirical forestry implemented in the Iberian Peninsula as the roots or origins of what we refer to nowadays as "sustainability", and to assess the contribution of imperial forestry to landscape planning and the conservation of forest resources, on the other, and, finally, to break away from the prevailing theological narrative that shipbuilding was the main agent of forest destruction in the early modern Iberian Peninsula, for which both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be conducted.

This book will be of key interest to environmental and social historians and researchers, and to anyone devoted to conducting research on the emergence and evolution of the concept of "sustainability" with respect to the governance and the historical transformation of woodlands around the world.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction: The Game of the Demiurge in the Garden of Chronos: Woods play hide-and-seek in the long run through sustainable management
• 1 The global timber trade and shipbuilding in the 16th–18th centuries: Interdisciplinarity, research problems and the ForSEAdiscovery project
• 2 Durable forests in a tensile state: Intensive and extensive approaches to naval forestry in Early Modern Spain
• 3 Empirical silviculture and sustainability in the Basque Country during the Early Modern period
• 4 The sustainability of forests for shipbuilding: A historical-archaeological view of Biscayan shipbuilding and its forestry tradition in the 16th–17th centuries
• 5 The beginnings of the preservation and development of Spanish forestry for naval construction: The legal and silvicultural enquiries conducted by the Royal Council of Castile in Guipúzcoa (1569)
• 6 “In all this kingdom there is no timber”: Wood for the king's galleys: exploitation and conservation of the Catalan forests in the age of Lepanto
• 7 A destruction that preserves: Maritime warfare, empirical forestry and sustainability in Portugal (13th–17th centuries)
• 8 Sustainability assessment of forest resources in the geographical area of application of the 1546 Cork Oak Law
• 9 Logistics, sustainability and river transport of wood supplies from the Navarrese Pyrenees for the Royal Navy at the end of the 18th century
• 10 Forests in Portugal, 1750s–1820s: A history of forests compensation
• Index