Enclosing Water

Stefania Barca is an environmental historian and senior researcher, Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. She is the author of the award-winning book Enclosing Water. Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley, 1796-1916 (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2010). Her current research interests lay at the intersection between labor environmentalism and eco-feminist political economy.

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of theIndustrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in
Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and
empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement'
and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - waterpower
- generated sweeping changes in its landscape
and working and living environments. This book tells
the story of how defining water as property - both
materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an
industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new
ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental
risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in
the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of
new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants,
illuminates how material developments and ideological
currents completely reshaped the relationship between
society and nature at the periphery of 19th century
Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the
narrative of European environmental history, this
pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses
of water disorder and environmental politics in the
Mediterranean region.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: WATER AND REVOLUTIONS. Italian landscape with waterfall A road to waterpower 1. The landscape of Political Economy Nature and nation in the Kingdom of Naples Improving the Valley Landscape and violence 2. Empire and the 'disorder of water' Liberating nature Rivers and revolution Seeing like a statistician 3. The ecology of waterpower The making of an industrial riverscape 'I'll have your flesh for three cents per pound': Gender and mechanisation Improvement vs. habitation The machine in the river: a pastoral narrative PART II: THE ECONOMY OF WATER One hundred years of enclosures Rivers and property in the Italian South 4. Enclosing the river Picture a river open to all... The appropriators Water wars, water discipline The tragedy of enclosure 5. Floods and politics in the Apennines Seeing like an engineer The un-improving State Industry and disaster EPILOGUE Common Water