/ Introduction State Forestry in Northern Europe Richard Hölzl and K. Jan Oosthoek Modern forestry is mostly centred upon national territories and this is refected in existing forest histories. Tere are national forest histo- ries of the lands of European colonial settlement – the United States, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand – but also of former European dependencies such as India and Zimbabwe. Te latter are ofen framed in the colonial experience of forestry. It is in this context of European colonial empires that transnational forest histories developed over the past few decades. Many of these histories focus upon the dissemina- tion of forestry practice amongst forest specialists and forestry agen- cies in the diferent colonial empires. 1 Comparative studies in forest history such as these are almost non-existent in the European context. 2 National forest histories of diferent European countries are ofen dif- fcult to access or even inaccessible to some specialists due to language ‘barriers’. 3 Tis book attempts to overcome these barriers by bringing together the histories of state forestry of several countries of Northern Europe that border the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Te choice of this geo- graphical region is based on the strong cultural, economic and political ties that have bound these countries together for centuries. What makes the North Sea and Baltic regions unique are the complexity of relation- ships and the diversity of nation states within them. At the same time, many economic historians see the North Sea and Baltic regions as a well-integrated and functioning economic area, with a long history of commodity fows. 4 By the Middle Ages, an intensive maritime trade network existed that linked the North Sea and Baltic coasts of Scandinavia, the German territories, the Low Countries and the British Isles. Timber was one of