This introduction to the special issue on timber colonialism argues that forests offer a uniquely productive lens for comparing how colonialism and capitalism transformed environments across time and place. Rather than proposing timber colonialism as a rival analytical framework to extractivism, the introduction treats the two as complementary: extractivism describes what happened to the forests, while timber colonialism describes what happened to the people. The ecological complexity of forests, their long temporality, their coincidence with Indigenous territories, and the multiple cycles of extraction they undergo make them unusually revealing sites for understanding colonial power. The eight papers in this collection span overlapping extractive frontiers in Algonquin Park, judicial dispossession in northern Scandinavia, internal colonialism in Russia’s European North, ecological substitution in southern Brazil, the colonial imaginary in Labrador and Sierra Leone, failed colonialism in Sheet’ka (Alaska), and capitalist deforestation without colonialism in Poland. Across these cases, labour regimes, property systems, and the material properties of timber itself shaped whether extraction materialized or failed, and whether colonial frameworks persisted beyond the colonial period. Together, the papers demonstrate that colonial relationships to forests produce dispossession whether or not the trees come down.