The state of the forests: empire, unemployment and the creation of forest work, 1916-45

This article examines the social and political context surrounding the creation of the Forestry Act (1919) and the establishment of the Forestry Commission, showing how the demands of the First World War prompted the British government to pass its first piece of state forest policy. I argue that afforestation efforts in the empire offered a template for what British administrators hoped to achieve across the four nations, but I explore how lessons drawn from the colonies, especially in India, circulated in a domestic landscape characterized by a different set of constraints and priorities than Britain's occupied territories. In Britain, the afforestation program, which began as a wartime strategy for securing scarce timber supplies, was refashioned into a plan for reducing rural unemployment and providing work and housing during the difficult interwar years. These activities saw the state extend its territorial reach across Britain and were part of an extraordinary expansion in state capacity that radically reconfigured the British state's relationship with land ownership.