Presentation short abstract

The presentation analyzes how mud and sandy roads affected mobility, work, and the reach of power in 18th-century Eastern Europe. It shows that seasonal friction shaped social relations and limited Enlightenment modernization projects.

Presentation long abstract

This paper proposes an environmental-historical reading of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe in which mud is treated not as background conditions but as active participants in political and infrastructural processes. Drawing on detailed evidence from road maintenance conflicts, vagrant interrogations, Jewish innkeeping networks, and hydrological regulations in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the paper examines how muddy roads, wetlands, and saturated soils shaped mobility, labor regimes, and the uneven reach of Enlightenment state-building.

Rather than viewing poor roads simply as symptoms of “backwardness,” the paper argues that soil friction itself generated specific social relations: seasonal mud slowed armies and tax collectors, enabled local support networks among peasants and Jewish commoners, and created conditions under which fugitives, smugglers, and itinerant workers could move unpredictably through landscapes considered illegible to the state. Administrators and reformers, in turn, treated mud as a problem demanding intervention—through forced labor, canal digging, drainage, and the removal of “heaps, dams and mills”—revealing a political hydrology in which both human and nonhuman flows had to be disciplined.

The paper traces how soil acted as a limiting infrastructure that contested visions of linear mobility, rationalized space, and modernized labor. In doing so, it shows that the politics of roads in Eastern Europe cannot be understood without attending to the agency of wet ground itself, its seasonal rhythms, and its capacity to both support and undermine projects of reform.