False Economy - Alan Beattie [45]
Timber for construction and firewood became in markedly short supply. It was even harder to quickly ramp up supply of slow-growing trees than it was of grain and other crops, and in any case forest was being cleared for arable land as well as for building and burning. The firewood-laded ships butting up the Channel were responding to what by the eighteenth century had become an acute shortage. British firewood costs increased sevenfold between 1500 and 1630; Denmark, another heavily populated region, lost around 80 percent of its forest cover between 1500 and 1800.
With a rising population, many Europeans shivered in the dark. One estimate suggests that the Continent produced fuel equivalent to just half a ton of coal per person per year in the eighteenth century. That was higher than was consumed in China and Japan, but then Northern Europeans had to contend with bitter winters and had a particularly energy-intensive style of cooking.
The discovery and exploitation of the coal reserves of Europe, and notably Britain, helped a good deal. But even with that supply of fuel, there was still a pressing imperative to import timber, food, and fiber— and implicitly, the land and water used to grow them. Britain's overseas possessions and colonies were, wherever possible, stripped of the resources on which the small and crowded mother country was running low. British colonialists went searching in heavily forested colonies from Quebec to Madras for wood, chiefly the high-quality timber used to build ships. By the time of the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century, a third of the British merchant fleet was built in the North American colonies.
In one valiant but spectacularly inept piece of forward planning, Britain even went to the considerable effort of establishing one of its Australian penal colonies on Norfolk Island, a remote speck in the ocean a thousand miles away from Sydney. (The island's second claim to fame was its later being settled by descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty.) When the first attempt was made to settle a colony there in 1788, the hope was that the trunks of the tall trees with which the isle was liberally forested would make masts and spars for Royal Navy ships, and that flax could be grown there to manufacture linen. In the event, the so-called Norfolk pine, technically not a member of the pine family, made a less than heroic contribution to the service of the British empire.
It turned out to be so brittle that a mast made of its timber would have snapped in the first serious gale.
The trade with the Americas, and notably the plantation colonies of northeastern Brazil, the Caribbean, and later the southern states of the United States, was a great deal more fruitful. Here was plenty of land and water. Though there were no huge technological breakthroughs during that time—the advent of ironclad steamships was not until the nineteenth century—the British navy replicated the Roman success in suppressing piracy, this time throughout the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean, thus allowing cargo to travel on unarmed, unescorted ships with smaller crews.
Just as Argentine agriculture was later in effect set up as a supply base for Europe, so the export monoculture of the plantation colonies, sending abroad a few products in bulk, was also well suited to the economies of scale needed to get Britain what it wanted cheaply and quickly. Along with timber, the Americas sent sugar and cotton to Britain, helping Britons cope with their resource crisis by increasing their caloric intake and allowing them to retain energy through warm, cheap clothing.
Sugar, as we will see in a later chapter, became one of the main fuels for the workers of the Industrial Revolution. Sugar made up perhaps 4 percent of total British