Inventing Nature: Forests, Forestry, and State Power in Renaissance Venice
Author(s)
Appuhn, Karl
Abstract
Scholars who study the emergence of modem states are, as a rule, obsessed with difference. They almost invariably ask why large national monarchies emerge as the dominant form of state organization during the early modem period. This question leads to discussions of what distinguished early modem national monarchies from other forms of political organization that lost the struggle for European and world dominance. While such debates have value, they elide another important question: What do emergent modem states, even the losers, have in common? Phrased this way, the question makes it possible to explain political development without recourse to a specific Weberian template based on the nation-state, thereby opening up a number of potentially valuable vistas on the history of state formation. Most important, it shows how some of the apparent losers in the pursuit of European dominance found rational and sometimes effective solutions to administrative problems that plagued nation-states. An analysis of such solutions shifts the emphasis away from the deterministic question of which regimes prospered toward those aspects of state development shared by all early modem regimes regardless of size, location, or political organization.
One of the traits that all early modem states are often said to share is the development of rational institutions and bureaucracies. There are two implicit assumptions contained in this assertion. First, rational institutions benefit the state because they increase its coercive power and promote stability. Second, nation-states won the struggle for power against local political and economic interests because their institutions provided them with a superior set of administrative solutions. Scholars have begun to challenge these assumptions, however, because the idealization of state rationality masks problems that were often created by poorly conceived and implemented central plans. This article examines the emergence, practice, and value of state rationality in terms of the capacity to exert control over vital natural resources, in this case, timber. An analysis of the development of Venetian forestry legislation and the appropriation of technical knowledge by central authorities will show how state rationalization worked in the context of a smaller republican city-state.
