“I Am a Poor Man with a Family”: Rangers, Social Welfare, and Monitor Networks in the Forests of Interwar Zlatna, Romania

Abstract

In the interwar period, forestry emerged as a powerful tool through which state institutions attempted to shape social and natural environments in rural Romania. This article evaluates how criminality, poverty, surveillance, exploitation, and labor intersected in Romania’s forests through the figure of the forest ranger, responsible for a range of tasks from managing forest ecology to serving as the state’s representative in the woodlands. Using a microhistorical approach, the article recounts the story of a Zlatna ranger investigated for theft in the late 1920s. His story and the individuals involved offer important insight into the asymmetrical power relations and local social factors that negotiated the forests’ legibility. Rangers served as part crucial asset, part embarrassing liability, existing in a liminal space between the state and local society. Through local forestry agents, their informal networks, and the “involuntary monitors” these invariably created, state forestry officials had valuable points of contact with rural society. This article demonstrates the value of rural perspectives in historical studies, challenging prevailing notions that conceptualize rural people as simple, irrelevant, or singlemindedly opposed to the encroachment of the modern state.