Forests in Revolutionary France

Kieko Matteson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. Her dissertation received the American Society for Environmental History's Rachel Carson Prize and Yale University's Henry A. Turner Prize for outstanding work in European history.

• Introduction; 1. The lay of the land; 2. 'Agromania' and silvicultural science; 3. 'A necessity as vital as bread'; 4. 'Seduced by the word 'liberty''; 5. 'Nothing is more respected than the right of property'; 6. 'Not even a branch of wood has been granted to us'; 7. Epilogue: 'homo is but arbor inversa'.

'Kieko Matteson's beautifully written and painstakingly researched history of French forests will become the gold standard on the subject. Matteson shows that, while the end of the early modern period did not invent deforestation, this transitional time created some of the key conditions for the rapid privatization and clearance of forests that were once communally owned and managed. Her book has important things to tell us about the links between politics, society, and economy, and the history of (un)sustainable resource management at the dawn of the modern age.' Jeremy L. Caradonna, University of Alberta and University of Victoria