Yesterday we had a pleasant and fruitful workshop of like-minded researchers from three projects (INFEST, Vienna - CONCRIS, Brno - REFRESH, Ostrava) in Brno. Looking forward to further collaboration on 19th-century forests and forestry!
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As the peasants saw it, the overlords relentlessly pursued their agenda of pushing them out of the forests: sometimes through legal tricks, sometimes through violence, sometimes through "the tyranny of the forest office"

Most of the petitions concerning woodland centred around access to woodland resources: richer peasants complained that they used to have it but now the overlord took it away. Poorer peasants complained that they had gone from little to zero.

The petitions range from sophisticated and self-assured (by wealthier peasants) to naive and desperate (by members of the rapidly expanding poorer layers of peasantry - they could usually read and write at this point, see pic, but observe how unsure much of the handwriting is)

If one is interested in how peasants saw the situation around forests and wood resources, it is worth looking at the many hundreds of petitions they sent to the so-called "národní výbor/Nationalausschuss" in the revolutionary year 1848.

The first Bohemian statistical work (published in 1885) already contained maps as well.

From the mid-1870s, the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture also started to publish official forest statistics, including details on, for example, offences against forest law. As the picture shows, in 1874 Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia gave more than one third of all cases.

Forest statistics proper (rather than descriptions of forests in tax conscriptions for example) on a larger than local basis were first prepared in Moravia with the help of questionnaires. The results were published in the journal of Moravian and Silesian foresters in the 1850.

Nonetheless, altogether they provide a huge mass of data! Here's a picture of the person behind it all: Emil Hošek (1923-2000). As the uniform also shows, he was (like most authors of individual volumes) originally trained as a forester not as a historian.

The volumes are essentially descriptive, summarizing information from older management plans and similar documents. Considering the number of people involved, the quality of individual volumes naturally varies quite a bit.

This impressive but internationally little known research programme was carried out between the 1950s and 1980s. Altogether ca. 550 (!) volumes were prepared by forest historians describing in detail the history of individual forest districts based on archival documents.

An excellent source of information on changes in tree species composition (and other things) in the 19th-20th centuries is the unpublished volumes of the so-called Historical forest research (Historický průzkum lesů) stored at the archives of the Czech Forestry Institute. Below is an example.

Tune in to find out more!

Were observable changes in the physical reality of forests consequences of crisis discourses and proposed solutions, or were such discourses rather adaptations to changing realities in the longue-durée history of forests?

Hello, everone!
Welcome to the bluesky account of the CONCRIS project.
The project will look at 140 years (ca. 1780-1918) of crisis discources in Czech forestry and coeval ecosystem changes in forests.