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Subject:
From:
Jaques Kerstenetzky <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:26:30 -0400
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Carlo Cipolla  discusses wood and coal in modern England in Before 
the Industrial Revolution (third edition), pp.268 -  270. I selected 
the lines bellow for shortness, but Cipolla's whole discussion deserves a look:

..England was never a heavy wooded country. What forest there was 
dwindled rapidly during the course of the sixteenth century, because 
of a combined expansion of population; building activity and timber 
consumption for domestic heating; shipbuilding; and production of 
charcoal, which was the only known fuel for a number of industrial 
processes. During the sixteenth century a number of Acts of 
Parliament tried to suppress the cutting of timber for industrial 
purposes. .... English historians tend to deny that there was a 
timber crisis at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But what 
was happening in the continent combined with a range of contemporary 
English evidence demonstrate that there certainly was a quite severe 
crisis. In 1548-9 the English government ordered an inquiry into the 
consumption of timber by the iron foundries in Sussex...

..England increasingly resorted to the kind of fuel which was 
abundant in the British isles.

Jaques Kerstenetzky

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