Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber. By Shawn William Miller. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 325. $55.00

The tropical forest of Brazil has been a symbol of America's abundance, potential, and mystery ever since the Portuguese first landed there in 1500; but harvesting its potential has never been easy. The complex reality of the forest has always made its exploitation complicated. Whereas the history of the Brazilian forest has previously been studied from an ecological point of view, particularly in Warren Dean's With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), the present book is less interested in what the Europeans should have done to save the forest than in what they actually did to turn the forest into the exploitable resource. Miller does not wish to condemn the colonists for exploiting the forest, nor does he think that slash-and-burn farming or timbering were wholly to blame for the resulting destruction. Instead, his story is centered on the negative effects of the real corte, a royal monopoly of the most attractive wood-bearing species, the so-called madeiras de lei, and on the long-term results of government monopoly on the economic development of the timber industry. In this, Miller follows the lead of F. W. O. Morton (“The Royal Timber in Late Colonial Bahia.” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 41–61), but he expands the boundaries of that important study both geographically and chronologically.