Keith Pluymers

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English forestry began to shift from a system of forest management grounded in enforcing the Forest Laws to new patterns of measuring and predicting yields and designating forest resources for particular user groups like shipbuilders or iron manufacturers. This shift provoked conflicts and crises but also marked an important step towards the concept of sustainability. Elements of these new practices moved with colonists around the Atlantic, but their first major efforts at transatlantic, imperial forestry took over a century to develop after the first colonial settlements.

Speaker Biography

Keith Pluymers – Associate Professor, Department of History, Illinois State University

Keith Pluymers is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University where he teaches courses on early modern Europe and environmental history. His first book, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) explores the relationship between fears of wood scarcity and English colonial expansion. It won the John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies.

Recommended Readings

Pluymers, K. (2021). No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Robson, E. (2016). Improvement and epistemologies of landscape in seventeenth-century English forest enclosure. The Historical Journal, 60(3), 597–632.

Warde, P. (2006). Fear of wood shortage and the reality of the woodland in Europe, c. 1450–1850. History Workshop Journal, 62(1), 28–57.