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Inventing Nature: Forests, Forestry, and State Power in Renaissance Venice*

Scholars who study the emergence of modern states are, as a rule, obsessed with difference. They almost invariably ask why large national monarchies emerge as the dominant form of state organization during the early modern period.1 This question leads to discussions of what distinguished early modern national monarchies from other forms of political organization that lost the struggle for European and world dominance. While such debates have value, they elide another important question: What do emergent modern states, even the losers, have in common? Phrased this way, the question makes it possible to explain political development without recourse to a specific Weberian template based on the nation-state, thereby opening up a number of potentially valuable vistas on the history of state formation. Most important, it shows how some of the apparent losers in the pursuit of European dominance found rational and sometimes effective solutions to administrative problems that plagued nation-states. An analysis of such solutions shifts the emphasis away from the deterministic question of which regimes prospered toward those aspects of state development shared by all early modern regimes regardless of size, location, or political organization.2