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- Convenors:
-
Sarah Elkind
(San Diego State University)
Aditya Ramesh (University of Manchester)
Zozan Pehlivan (University of Minnesota)
Emiliano Travieso (Carlos III University of Madrid)
Melanie Kiechle (Virginia Tech)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Aditya Ramesh
(University of Manchester)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Nature for Harvest: Commodities and Resources
- Location:
- Room 17
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Land and water are building blocks of economies and environments, but also communities, nation-states, empires, at many scales of power. This round table will discuss the transformations of land and water around the world, at the intersections of environmental, economic and political history.
Long Abstract:
This session brings together economic and environmental historians to discuss land and water at the intersections of state power, capitalism and environmental transformation. Our goal is also a conversation about environmental and economic history methodologies and transdiciplinary perspectives.
We envision a roundtable conversation that considers how state and non-state actors used technology, administrative bodies, public policy, economic reasoning, and violence to transform land and water, and how the transformation of land- and water-scapes alters political, social, and economic systems.
The co-conveners compare specific case studies of agrarian reform, environmental change, and economic development in the 20th century in four countries and three continents. A case study from British India explores the relationship between engineering and economic imaginaries, and the conflict between colonial extraction and older systems of agricultural property. This conflict between the State and rural communities lies at the heart of the story of high dam construction in southeastern Anatolia. Economic development for Turkey's eastern cities - hydropower construction -- was used as a tool of social engineering and dispossession in Anatolia. The U.S. example explores the application of economic reasoning to resolve urban-rural tensions in the United States; this laid bare the social consequences of development spending, and made explicit the politics of power. The final case examines proposals to redistribute land in Uruguay, the failure of which demonstrated the power within and beyond the State, and an opportunity use environmental history methodologies to rethink the ways economic history treats natural resources.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
Examining the economic logic in and distribution of benefits from American water projects reveals the distribution of political and social power in mid-century America, and offers a means to integrate environmental justice, discrimination, and metrics of power into economic and political analyses.
Contribution long abstract:
My research interests: My contribution to the “Water, Land, and Power in the Twentieth Century” roundtable examines the application of economic analysis to American water policy in the work of the President’s Water Resources Policy Commission of 1950. Examining who benefited from and was displaced by federal water projects reveals the distribution of political and social power in mid-century America, and offers a means to integrate environmental justice, discrimination, and metrics of power into economic and political analyses. This case study also reveals how deeply embedded economic analysis is and has been in environmental policy. The resulting policies reordered the American economy even as they compounded environmental injustices of dispossession and displacement of the US’s African-American, Indigenous and Hispanic communities. This record of environmental injustice is not solely the result of economic analysis, but it is extremely difficult to separate the consequences of pure power politics, utilitarian emphasis on developing resources to provide the greatest good to the greatest number, and the expectation that economic analysis could finally offer federal officials an apolitical policy-analysis tool from America's record on racial exclusion in embedding environmental racism in America's water- and landscapes.
My interest in this panel: This roundtable offers an opportunity for transnational comparisons the impact of economic logics on environmental justice and resource policies. We are also seeking to frame a new interpretive intersection between environmental and economic history.
Contribution short abstract:
From the 1960s onward, Turkey has been building hydro-power dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This paper focuses on the corresponding relationship between energy production and development centered in the industrialized west and dispossession in the largely agricultural and pastoral east.
Contribution long abstract:
From the mid-twentieth century onward, Turkey has been building hydro-power dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. By focusing on the various stages of damming in Turkey and the corresponding relationship between energy production and development centered in the industrialized and urbanized west and dispossession in the largely agricultural and pastoral east, this paper examines the impact of damming on the development of modern Turkey and underdevelopment of the southeastern Anatolia between 1960 and 2020. It argues that damming was the most important source of development in modern Turkey and a new stage of indigenous dispossession and displacement that has been documented by many historians in global south.
Contribution long abstract:
My research interests: My contribution to the “Water, Land, and Power in the Twentieth Century” roundtable examines Uruguay's land reform project of the 1960s. I use this (ultimately frustrated) initiative as a vantage point to examine the interaction between land tenure and environmental degradation in the country, with reference to preceding history since late-colonial times. I map and analyse data on land ownership, land use, and erosion to show that in the twentieth century Uruguay’s grasslands deteriorated while tenure institutions and landholding patterns were unable to change in response to these new environmental conditions. I argue this story challenges the standard economic history approaches to the environment, which usually frame it as a time-invariant set of variables (in models inspired by development economics) or as a deep structure that only changes at a glacial pace (in the Braudealian framework).
My interest in this panel: This roundtable brings economic and environmental history into dialogue with one another in potentially novel ways. It will provide an opportunity for reciprocal comparisons of historical experiences where economic logic and concerns about environmental sustainability interacted.
Contribution short abstract:
This contribution considers the economic and environmental consequences of efforts to expand rainfed cultivation into more arid regions of the eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Contribution long abstract:
As one Syrian agronomist observed in the early twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean had vast expanses of fertile plains but few sources of consistent water to ensure irrigation for their cultivation. These regions were either dependent on rainfall or, if the geography was right, groundwater channeled through underground tunnels from higher elevations to lower ones where it could be distributed through irrigation networks. For administrators in the late Ottoman Empire and under the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, these lands represented one of the best options for increasing revenue extraction from agricultural production but maintaining them in cultivation proved challenging. This contribution to the roundtable considers the management strategies devised to expand cultivation into these arid regions by the Ottoman administration and then the French mandate government. It contrasts their approaches and the divergent environmental and economic consequences for these lands and their inhabitants. The case study proposes to explore how administrative strategies aimed in the late Ottoman period to use these lands to disrupt provincial elite capital accumulation and shore up a source of fiscal sovereignty while, under the mandate, official projects targeted them as repositories for investing surplus colonial capital, ultimately leading to cultivator dispossession. The contrasting approaches to managing these resources suggest the unique ways in which state power has been variously exerted in the service of capital in marginal ecologies to produce new social and economic realities.
Contribution short abstract:
We have dedicated these last four years to the study of Portuguese water pollution surveillance, namely the different interests and narratives that interconnects waste to the public water management authority, industrials, professional fishermen, municipalities and aquacultural agencies.
Contribution long abstract:
We want to learn experiences by which scholars discuss waste. Waste united several actors, with different interests and narratives. In the end, technology was seen as a symbol of redemption, and encouraged as part of environmental restoration. We hope to contribute with some examples of toxicity and waste management. What is the role of pollution in historical studies? What disciplines should strengthen environmental history? Is science and regulation in fact powerless? These are some ideas we would like to share.
Pollution in River Ave basin was caused by hundreds of industrial companies. Sustained by hydraulic energy, until 1974 they would settle in the river margins. However, having installed primitive wastewater treatments, these companies preferred to pay fines rather than prevent contaminations. Until late 1950’s law enforcement was a random and an arbitrary procedure, mainly based on sensorial perceptions, which consisted in the changing colors and odors of water and in community protests. In fact, wasted water turned impossible to wash clothes or feed cattle.
As environmental damage became obvious — as waste became tangible — companies were pressured to develop sophisticated wastewater treatment facilities. However, industrials would face depuration plants’ high costs, and created several networks of value. For instance, neighbors would accept some sewers as crop fertilizer, and plants would throw their sewers into municipal collectors, reducing treatment costs. We want to compare these findings and contribute to understand the several ways by which water became affected by contaminations.