The colonial Brazil's forest history can be thought as an interdependent development of many kinds of environmental appropriation. Until now, however, this history has been written from the almost-exclusively point of view of agriculture and its hegemonic actors, the large farmers. The aim of this article is to expand our analytical framework by investigating another form of appropriation - timber industry - as well as its social agents. We analyze 1797 year empirical data referred to lumber production in Santo Antônio de Sá, traditional lumberjack region of eighteenth century Rio de Janeiro plain. Quantitative indicators (agrarian classes participation on the number of lumbermen, both total and internal to class, and the average productions), corroborated by textual descriptions - such as the exchange of timber for food in taverns - reveal that the responsible actors for this production were the small subsistence farmers. This result can be explained by the colonial small farmer's difficulty to obtain money and/or surplus with significant exchange value. Despite the limitations of a spatially and temporally small case-study, the research, by expanding our conception of the small farmer's environmental role - not only as a agriculturist but as well as a lumberman - opens a new analytical perspective on the study of the colonial forest history.
Timber industry; farmers; Vale do Macacu; eighteenth century Rio de Janeiro; environmental history
