‘How About the Threatened Timber Famine’: Timber Merchants, Wood Shortage and Global Surveys on Timber Production and Consumption

In the late nineteenth century, concerns about timber scarcity and forest depletion in industrialising countries contributed to the production of forest inventories and timber trade statistics on a planetary scale. Warnings about the eventual exhaustion of the North American pine forest erupted in the British trade press, at a time of intense public discussions about the natural limits of coal supply and the implications for the industrial and economic supremacy of Great Britain. It was in this context that the British government launched an effort to inventory forest areas and compile statistical data on timber production and consumption in various national settings. This paper focuses alternately on the perspectives of timber merchants, state representatives and scientists, to understand how international inventories of forest resources and global surveys on timber trade emerged from debates about a timber famine during the integration of the world economy at the end of the nineteenth century.