Regulating the Wood Trade and Forestry: Timber Tariffs in Imperial Germany (1870s–1910s)

In the mid-nineteenth century, when Germany turned into the second-largest wood-importing nation in Europe, political and social tensions arose over the wood trade. In 1879, along with iron and grain, timber became one of the main commodities on which the protectionist compromise between landowners and heavy industry was based. Subsequently, Germany reformed timber tariffs several times – including railway tariffs and criteria for classifying wood types – thereby sparking heated controversies in domestic politics, academic debates among forest scientists and changes in international relations with Russia and Austria-Hungary. Timber tariffs contributed to fiscal revenue, but protectionist policies proved insufficient to curb wood imports from neighbouring countries. Investigating the evolution of protectionist policies in the field of the wood trade, their economic effects as well as their impact on German forestry, this article aims to explore the political and economic conflicts revolving around the wood trade in the age of protectionism. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .