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This chapter explores the debates over exploitation of India’s forests, and focuses more specifically on the rise of conservationist concerns, in which forestry played a major role. The new demands inevitably led to deforestation.

Indigenous hardwoods were prime riches in this treasure trove essential to the British army, navy, and railways, they became cogs in the conquest of India. More particularly, this provided a shopping list of tradable resources and their uses-a detailed breakdown of the natural wealth of India, about which many classical writers had enthused. ‘A collection properly grouped together’, Baden-Powell wrote in the introduction, ‘becomes to the intelligent spectator a perfect history of the social condition of the country it represents’. But it was their uses, primarily to empire, and also to local communities, which distinguished these specimens. Baden-Powell savoured the size, colour, and quality of each specimen, interspersed with grand descriptions of the countryside from which they came. A section was devoted to animal products such as lac (later used to make gramophone records), silk, musk, and wool opium and 2,038 other drugs were listed, as well as the economic crops tea, cotton, flax, spices, grains, and pulses.

Timber and other forest products featured alongside minerals, metals, manufacturing dyes, pottery, salt, and soils. It began simply as a catalogue of all the items exhibited, but mushroomed into something more. Baden-Powell of the Bengal Civil Service as the Hand-Book of the Economic Products of the Punjab. The ‘riches’ of provincial India that were shown at the Punjab Exhibition of 1864 were later described in two hefty volumes by B.