Fruitless trees

"For the most part, the forests of colonial Brazil were not harvested, but annihilated, and relatively little was extracted for the benefit of Brazilians, a tragedy perhaps worse than deforestation alone. Fruitless Trees aims to make sense of what at first glance appears to be the senseless destruction of Brazil's incomparable timber.". "Challenging previous scholarship that simply ascribed the destruction of Brazil's remarkable forests to the Europeans' voracious greed and inherent hostility to the forest, the author argues that we must delineate the extent to which topical timber was put to advantageous ends, and explore precisely why so large a proportion of Brazil's timber was incinerated rather than converted to colonial wealth."--BOOK JACKET.