British Timber Trade - Origins

Origins

From before the industrial revolution period the price of timber in England had been increasing as domestic quantities became more difficult to obtain. Many industries thus were forced to change to substitutes. As the industrial revolution progressed coal replaced timber for use as fuel, while brick replaced timber for use in construction.

It would be many decades, however, before iron could be used to replace timber in shipbuilding. By the eighteenth century England had not exhausted its supply of suitable domestic hardwood timber but - like the Netherlands - it imported softwood supplies. While every nation has trees and wood, ship timber is a far more limited product. The ideal woods were oak, Scots pine - but not spruce, and other large trees. Especially difficult to find were trees suitable to be masts, a crucial requirement for any sailing ship, and one that often had to be replaced after storms or wear. As suitable trees take decades to grow, in densely populated nations like England any given square metre of land could, usually, be far more valuably employed by producing foodstuffs rather than timber.

Timber was thus only a viable industry in sparsely populated lands such as Scandinavia, those in the Baltic Sea area, and in North America. The Baltic countries, and especially Norway, had other benefits including superior sawmills, and often lower transport prices than distant overland travel. The British shipping industry, by the late seventeenth century, increasingly utilised imports of Baltic timber.