By choosing to concentrate upon discovering what forest resources were available to the French navy during the ancien rEgime and what use it was able to make of them, Mr. Bamford has not only provided the first monograph on that subject in the English language, but has gone far toward explaining why France was the loser in the long duel with England for the control of commerce and the extension of empire.

Two years of research in the Archives Nationales and in the Archives de la Marine in Paris, Toulon, and Rochefort enabled him to draw on contemporary sources of...