Understanding the historic legacies of empire from the timbers left behind: Towards critical dendroprovenancing in the British North Atlantic

Abstract

The forests of British North America were integral to Britain's maritime empire. Many of these timbers exist today as wooden beams and flooring at historical dockyards and garrisons such as the Royal Naval Dockyard of Bermuda. In this paper, we investigate what timbers from this Dockyard can tell us about interconnections and empire‐building throughout the North Atlantic region. To do this we drew from approaches of critical physical geography, historical geography, and dendroprovenancing by using timber as a way to interrogate collaboratively the changes in—and connections across—socio‐ecological landscapes. We examined HM Customs records between 1825 and 1850 to determine the flow of timbers to Bermuda. We then sampled timbers from buildings constructed between 1825 and 1853 and analyzed them using isotopic and dendrochronological techniques to establish the probable location of origin of the timber samples. HM Customs records showed that prior to the 1840s, timbers primarily came from British North America, whereas post‐1840 timbers primarily came from the southeastern United States, with some still coming from Europe and British North America. To establish whether timber use by the Royal Navy and Royal Engineers matched the pattern in the customs documents, we looked to the dendrochronological records. Dendrochronologic evidence showed that military construction followed the same pattern, with buildings constructed pre‐1840 using material from British North America and buildings constructed post‐1840 using timbers sourced from the southeastern United States. Finally, using this information we explore some of the connections between regions, in terms of resource use, and the implications of those uses—for example, that the British Admiralty continued to benefit from the practices of slavery through the use of products produced from enslaved labour in other parts of the North Atlantic well after emancipation.

Practicing critical physical geography: New trading zones and interactional expertise in an expanding field

“…A corollary of this tenet is that experimenting with multiple theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches across disciplinary boundaries can allow researchers to think through such eco‐social relations and complexities (Biermann et al, 2020; Lave et al, 2018; Shaw & Corner, 2017). For example, papers in this special section provide frameworks on how to employ social empirical approaches, such as ethnography (e.g., Luthra et al, 2021, this special section), to contextualize biophysical processes, and biophysical empirical approaches, such as dendrochronology (e.g., Greer et al, 2023, this special section), and to examine socio‐historical processes. Other papers engage with CPG's first tenet by mixing quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g., Malone & McClintock, 2022, this special section) to highlight previously undetected eco‐social relations.…”

“…While many of the papers in this section deal with recent or ongoing processes, Greer et al (2023) develop an historical approach that combines dendrochronological methods (tree-ring dating and stable isotopic analysis) with archival research (analysis of customs records). The authors focus on a single piece of infrastructure within Britain's maritime empire: the Royal Navy Dockyard of Bermuda.…”