The Danish Revolution, 1500-1800 An Ecohistorical Interpretation

This book tells the story of a fertile European country that, as a result of over population and military armament, over exploited its fields and forests in a non-sustainable fashion. By the eighteenth century Denmark, along with other European countries, found itself in an ecological crisis involving clear felling of forests, sand drift, floods, inadequate soil fertilization and cattle disease. This crisis was overcome by a green biotechnological revolution that changed the whole pattern of agriculture, and by the abandonment of wood as a raw material and source of energy in favour of coal and iron. This book outlines the background of the present-day ecological crisis, both in the industrial world and in developing countries, and attempts to understand early modern Europe from a consistently ecological viewpoint.

List of illustrations; Preface; Introduction; Part I. Denmark, 1500–1750: A Country in an Ecological Crisis: 1. The road to the crisis; 2. The anatomy of the crisis; Part II. The Ecological Revolution: 3. The green revolution; 4. The energy and raw materials revolution; Part III. The New Denmark; 5. Landscape; 6. Labour burden and social structure; 7. The disease pattern; 8. Power; Part IV. The Driving Forces Behind the Danish Revolution, 1500–1800; 9. Agrarian reforms; 10. Technology and communications systems; Part V. The Inheritance: 11. The social and political inheritance: individualism and the liberal democratic society; 12. The ecological inheritance; Appendices; Sources and bibliography; Index.

This book tells the story of a fertile European country that, as a result of over population and military armament, found itself in an ecological crisis. This book explores Denmark's successful strategies for recovery, and provides an important historical background to the modern ecological crisis.