A World of a Thousand Cuts: Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
6-8 July, 2027, hosted by the University of Turin
Proposal Deadline: 30 November 2026
The mainstream historiographies of industrialisation habitually emphasise the novel energy sources and materials that powered this transformative era, such as coal, steel, steam and electricity, implicitly assuming that wood, an important pre-industrial resource, was destined for an inevitable decline. Histories of industrialisation also disproportionately focus on Europe and North America. Stemming from the research vectors of the ERC Starting Grant “Industrial Wood: European Industrialisation as Seen from the Forests (1870-1914)”, this conference aims to rethink the relevance of wood in an unevenly industrialising world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It follows more recent interpretative paths, which draw attention to the material diversity of industrial metabolism, in order to achieve a more complex understanding of the social, economic and environmental histories of industrialisation. The conference also seeks to geographically decentre the research perspective and discover the links between forests and industrialisation in the global context.
Industrialisation, understood as a systemic social and economic transformation underpinned by technological innovations and leading to changes in production regimes, was an uneven and chronologically mis-aligned process within Europe and globally, stretching from the late 18th century far into the 20th century. Consequently, the relationship between industrialisation and forest exploitation varied depending on the national and international politics, markets, law regulations, access to technology, environmental movements, property and labour regimes, imperial dynamics and colonial power. Attentive to these complexities, the organisers have approached industrialisation as an a-synchronous, multi-focal and globally encompassing social and economic process, activated by a confluence of economic impetus and political agenda.
Even if in the course of industrialisation wood has been marginalised as a combustible, it maintained its significance in industrial economies as a construction material. Moreover, innovations in technology and transportation – both the drivers and the outcomes of industrialisation – made forests increasingly accessible for large-scale extraction, thus bringing industrial logging into the furthest reaches of the woods and fundamentally reshaping them economically, socially and ecologically. Recent historical, anthropological and archeological studies, focusing mostly on North America and Europe, show that extractivism, (im)migration and environmental degradation were a part of this process. They also reveal that industrialisation of timber production did not mean a complete break with rural economies, and that the demand for wood as fuel or production material (for paper or packaging, for example) changes depending on the historical moment. Through this conference, we aim to broaden the conversation geographically to include global histories of industrialisation and to answer these questions: how did industrialisation change the world’s forests? What kinds of new relationships, dependencies and hierarchies did the arrival of industrialisation within the forest context instigate with regards to natural environments and the working lives linked to their transformation? How does our understanding of industrialisation change when we cease to read it as a sequence of substitutions and instead view it as a process of persistence, accumulation and re-articulation, wherein old material and energy flows are not erased by new ones but are intricately woven into them, undergoing profound transformation? Ultimately, what does the industrialisation of forests mean? And how do we adjust our research methodologies to answer these questions?
The conference seeks to explore cases, with a double focus on forests and industrialisation, in various political contexts and across different geographies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The papers should relate to but do not have to be limited to the following themes:
- industrialisation and wood consumption
- labour, migration, gender and ethnicity
- empires, colonialism and decolonisation
- industrial wood uses, wood-based businesses and geographies of timber flow
- networks, circulation of ideas and technology
- industrial timberscapes (timber production complexes, workers settlements, infrastructure)
- deindustrialisation and its impact on livelihoods
- environmental effects of industrialisation in forests
Scholars in humanities and social sciences, interested in these topics, are welcome to apply. Ultimately, the conference aims to foster an interdisciplinary confluence between environmental history, social history, economic history, environmental anthropology and related sub-disciplines. We invite contributions from doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers and senior scholars.
ORGANISATION, SUBMISSION AND DEADLINES:
To apply for the conference, please submit a single PDF-file consisting of:
- an abstract of the presentation with a title (max. 500 words)
- name, institutional affiliation, and a list of relevant publications
The applications should be sent to inwood@unito.it.
The organisers will cover meals, travel (economy-class flight or train) and accommodation expenses. The conference will be held in person.
Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2026.
The notifications about the participation in the conference will be sent by the end of January 2027.
Successful applicants will be asked to submit the drafts of their papers (6,000 words) by 15 June 2027.
The organisers plan to publish the papers as an edited volume or a special issue of a journal.
Organisers:
Giacomo Bonan, Kateryna Burkush, Vincenzo Colaprice, Csongor Jánosi, Claudio Lorenzini, Silvia Pizzirani
Feature Image: The cableway loading station at Mikestelep (Gelence), Háromszék County, Austria-Hungary, c. 1905. Source: Private collection of the Mikes family.
