Awards

• Winner of American Historical Association Herbert Baxter Adams Prize 2010 (United States)
• Winner of American Historical Association Herbert Baxter Adams Prize 2010.
• Winner of American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize 2010.
• Winner of Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award 2010 (United States)

Overview

Wood was essential to the survival of the Venetian Republic. To build its great naval and merchant ships, maintain its extensive levee system, construct buildings, fuel industries, and heat homes, Venice needed access to large quantities of oak and beech timber. The island city itself was devoid of any forests, so the state turned to its mainland holdings for this vital resource. A Forest on the Sea explores the history of this enterprise and Venice's efforts to extend state control over its natural resources. Karl Appuhn explains how Venice went from an isolated city completely dependent on foreign suppliers for wood to a regional state with a sophisticated system of administering and preserving forests. Intent on conserving this invaluable resource, Venice employed specialized experts to manage its forests. The state bureaucracy supervised this work, developing a philosophy about the environment-namely, a mutual dependence between humans and the natural world-that was far ahead of its time. Its efforts kept many large forest preserves under state protection, some of which still stand today. A Forest on the Sea offers a completely novel perspective on how Renaissance Europeans thought about the natural world. It sheds new light on how cultural conceptions about nature influenced political policies for resource conservation and land management in Venice.

Full Product Details

9780801892615

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Reviews

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 their 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. - Paula Findlen, Stanford University 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. - John A. Marino, University of California at San Diego

A useful work for upper-level students doing in-depth research... Recommended. Choice 2010 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. -- David Celetti Renaissance Quarterly 2010 Magisterial. -- John M. Hunt Journal of Modern History 2011

Author Information

Karl Appuhn is an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at New York University.

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