Rural & Environmental history (c. 1501-1800)

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world when how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities? This volume explores communities’ relationship with the natural environment in customs and laws ideas practices and memories. Taking a transregional perspective it considers how the availability of natural resources in diverse societies within and outside Europe impacted mobility and gender structures the consolidation of territorial power and property rights. Communities Environment and Regulation in the Premodern World marks Peter Hoppenbrouwers’s career spanning over three decades as a professor of medieval history at Leiden University.

This article combines environmental and political history approaches and explores the relationship between the environment and the political with regard to regime-building processes. In doing so it proposes a procedural and process-oriented approach to the analysis of Italian liberal and fascist regimes (1860s-1930s) from the perspective of environmental politics and management. Based on the empirical case of the Pontine Marshes the article addresses the question of whether distinctive liberal and fascist features existed in relation to the environment and proposes three areas worthy of further investigation that bridge the distance between environmental and political history. The first of these areas being the decision-making process over the environment; the second the systems of environmental knowledge production that a regime accepts and deploys in environmental management; the third the principles behind environmental intervention or non-intervention.

Late Holocene dunes migration is intricately linked to climate change and anthropogenic actions. Along the Portuguese coast large-scale sand drifts occurred between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes associated with the Little Ice Age (LIA) period characterised by long-term cooling across the north Atlantic region. Primary historical sources coupled with scientific data about paleoenvironmental conditions and OSL ages were used to analyse the spatial and temporal extent of the sand drift occurrences and explore their impact on coastal communities. Covering the period of the past millennium the study describes the main drivers for drift events in Portugal. The results show the intensification of sand drift episodes after 1500 AD which can be attributed to both natural forcing factors and human activities (e.g. agriculture and intensive deforestation). It is also clear that human pressure on dunes was dominant after 1800 when dunes fixing strategies through afforestation programmes were seen as the best solution to control sand encroachment. The negative impact of the drift-sands was an important trigger for the management of coastal areas and determinant for the implementation of a set of environmental policies in Portugal. Through a geohistorical perspective the paper discloses the human-nature interactions over time and the long-term efforts of governments to control natural processes contributing to large-scale landscape transformation of the Portuguese coastal dunes.

Wondering how medieval people perceived their environment has long moved scholars onto untamed research paths. A strong focus on scholastic writings as sources has left an unfinished picture of medieval societies’ perceptions of nature. Pilgrimage accounts written by lay authors offer a rare opportunity to explore other perspectives on nature although of course in a setting which was profoundly shaped by religious experience and tradition. Through the example of Arnold von Harff travelling between 1496 and 1498 in the Mediterranean I propose methods to recognise the different coexisting attitudes towards the natural world theorised by David Herlihy in secular writings. Combining discourse analysis with literary GIS I suggest some explanations as to why travellers would switch between attitudes along their journey and how spatio-temporal parameters influenced their decisions. As a result we understand that fear was only one of von Harff’s many attitudes to the natural world and that his ability to stage different aspects of his identity was firmly determining his perception(s) of nature. By interpreting the landscapes in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean differently von Harff could learn from and about the environment suggesting that secular travel was commendable along the allegedly strict pilgrimage roads.

Studies dealing with inequality in European societies have multiplied in recent years. It has now become clear that pressing questions about the historical trends showing both income and wealth inequality as well as the factors leading to an increase or drop of inequality over time could be answered only by taking into account preindustrial times. Therefore this book deals with inequality in the long-run covering and comparing a very long time span starting its investigations in the later middle ages and ending before the nineteenth century the period that marks the beginning of most available studies.

Hitherto urban distribution of income and wealth is much better known than rural inequality. This book intends to reduce this gap in knowledge bringing rural inequality to the fore of research. Since at least until the nineteenth century the majority of people were country men looking at the rural areas is crucial when trying to identify the underlying causes of inequality trends in the long run of history.　

The book consists of nine original papers and deals with a variety of topics about inequality covering no less than eight different countries in Europe. The majority of the studies published in this book are the result of teamwork between European universities where a range of research centres are currently exploring different aspects of income and wealth inequality in preindustrial times.

COVID-19 gives a fresh urgency to research trajectories around climate and environment in historical research. We use examples from African Japanese and medieval European environmental history to chart new ways to mobilise collaborative research into the planetary past in academic and public discussions. Our main points are first that COVID-19 has underlined the entanglements between human and planetary life which historians must better account for. Secondly it is pertinent to decentre knowledge production. COVID-19 and climate crisis are both global phenomena. Yet patterns of knowledge production that propose ‘universal’ frameworks and solutions obscure highly unequal power relations. We call for more plural histories - in time space and species - to confront the complex crises of our times.

Long-term European experience with the plague and other epidemics has established a set of governance practices to limit the spread of disease such as quarantine lock-down of public life and reduction of economic activities etc. They have now returned during the COVID-19 crisis. However it seems that the memory of European confrontations with pandemics has been lost among a majority of citizens. This has opened a door for social myths and conspiracy theories to enter the debate. Doubts about the legitimacy of restrictions on free movement (travel social distancing) and individual choice (the wearing of masks) have been nourished particularly by the political right. Reviving our knowledge of past experiences with disease may be useful in this context. Tracing the history of the plague in Europe not only unveils a remarkable story of learning how to control the spread of a disease before its etiology was fully understood; it also reveals a co-evolutionary relationship between state power and disease which is driven by the expansion of executive power into the area of public health. Returning to the present COVID-19 crisis one can observe not only how the state of emergency is being used by autocrats and right-wing populists to undermine democratic institutions. One can also observe fatal government failure in countries like the United States where trust in state power has been undermined by various groups in the recent past.

The current pandemic strikingly reveals that the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus is inextricably intertwined in human practices. It is transmitted through everyday routines and understood though practices of scientific research. While praxeology as a theoretical approach is often used in historical research to analyze social phenomena it also provides a useful perspective on socio-environmental change such as the spread of diseases. With a focus on human practices this essay rejects notions subsumed under buzzwords like ‘New Materialism’ or ‘Post-Humanism’ which attribute ‘agency’ to entities such as viruses. Instead it contends that while viruses do evolve beyond human control and have a significant impact on society this impact is not only tied to human activities but that humans are able to actively alter the course of the pandemic by reflecting on the nexus between practices and viruses. This article illustrates these mechanisms with examples from the current pandemic and the longer history of hygiene in the nineteenth century.

This essay asks whether there is a connection between the three crises that are currently reverberating globally the climate crisis the COVID-19 crisis and the ‘crisis of white supremacy’. The latter resurfaced violently at first in the US with the murder of the African-American citizen George Floyd on May 25 at the hands of US police. This contribution argues that the parallel occurrence of these three crisis-like processes which unfold on divergent time scales is not a coincidence and that they are indeed connected. Using approaches from historical disaster research and the history of environmental entanglements the essay highlights the vulnerability of specific population groups that has grown over the historical longue durée both in the context of the climate crisis and in the context of the pandemic. In a second step the contribution embeds the climate and corona crises as partial crises in the larger context of the Anthropocene. By going back to the colonial prehistory of this new ‘Age of humans’ the essay shows how extreme resource exploitation and the accompanying destruction of nature - as a precondition for today’s climate change and zoonosis-induced pandemics - are intertwined with white superiority thinking and systemic racism.