Timber stockpiles and generational planning

The Royal Navy bought timber continuously and stockpiled it rather than waiting for an individual ship order. Even so, Britain came close to exhausting its usable wood during the Seven Years' War and twice during the Napoleonic Wars. Faster-growing larch and other substitutes supplemented or sometimes replaced oak when supply tightened. Maintaining the fleet therefore required current logistics and planting whose payoff would come under much later governments. Landowners also treated oak forests as intergenerational investments whose value might be realized only by their grandchildren. This practice drew on an older English tradition of managing timber for longbow production. Naval technology depended on institutions capable of preserving resources across lifetimes.