The White Horse Press Full citation: Barca, Stefania. Enclosing Water: Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley, 1796–1916. Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2010. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3493. Rights: All rights reserved. © The White Horse Press 2010. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. For further information please see http://www.whpress.co.uk. Enclosing Water Stefania Barca Enclosing Water Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley, 1796–1916 The White Horse Press Copyright © Stefania Barca First published 2010 by The White Horse Press, 10 High Street, Knapwell, Cambridge, CB23 4NR, UK Set in 10 point Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Lightning Source All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopy- ing or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-874267-56-0 (HB); 978-1-874267-57-7 (PB) To Marco and Giulia Contents Abbreviations. ix Biographical.Note. x Acknowledgments. xi Introduction. 1 Part.I:.Water.and.Revolution Italian Landscape with Waterfall. 5 A Road to Waterpower. 10 1 ..The.Landscape.of.Political.Economy. 13 Nature and Nation in the Kingdom of Naples. 16 Improving the Valley . 26 Landscape and Violence. 29 2 ..Empire.and.the.‘Disorder.of.Water’. 36 Liberating Nature. 37 Seeing like a Statistician. 41 Rivers and Revolution. 48 3 ..The.Ecology.of.Waterpower. 59. The Making of an Industrial Riverscape. 60 ‘I’ll have your flesh at three cents per pound’: Gender and Mechanisation. 66 Improvement vs. Habitation. 69 The Machine in the River: A Pastoral Narrative . 75 Part.II:.The.Economy.of.Water. One Hundred Years of Enclosures. 85 Water and the State in the Mezzogiorno. 90 4 ..Water.Property.and.the.State. 95 Picture a River Open to All…. 96 viii The Appropriators . 99 Water Wars, Water Discipline. 106 The Tragedy of Enclosure. 111 5 ..Disciplining.Water:.Floods.and.Politics.in.the.Apennines.. 117 Seeing Like an Engineer. 119 The Un-Improving State . 126 The Disorder of Industry . 133 Epilogue. Common Waters . 141 Bibliography. 145 Notes. 157 Index. 173 ix Abbreviations Some archival sources are referred to in the notes using the following abbreviations. Translations from these and other Italian language sources are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated. AC (Affari Comunali) ACSR (Archivio Centrale dello Stato-Roma) ADC (Atti Diversi Comunali) AIC (Agricoltura Industria e Commercio) AP (Alta Polizia) ASC (Archivio di Stato di Caserta), ASN (Archivio di Stato di Napoli), BSCN (Bollettino delle Sentenze della Commissione Feudale) CA (Contenzioso Amministrativo) CPTL (Consigli Provinciali in Terra di Lavoro) DGPAS (Direzione Generale Ponti, Acque e Strade) IAC (Intendenza Affari Comunali) IB (Intendenza Borbonica) Inv. (inventario) LLPP (Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici) MI (Ministero dell’Interno) PC (Prefettura Contratti) PCA (Prefettura, Carte Amministrative) PPS (Prefettura Prima Serie) PS (Ponti e Strade) PS-B (Ponti e Strade-Bonifiche) Biographical Note Stefania Barca (b. Naples 1968) is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra in Portugal. After obtaining her PhD in Economic History in 1997, she collaborated with the Institute of Studies on Mediterranean Societies in Naples and lectured in economic, social and environmental history at various Universities in Italy. She was a visiting scholar on the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University in 2005–06, and a Ciriacy Wantrup post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in 2006–08. Her publications include the books Elettrificare la Puglia (2001, ‘The Electrification of Apulia’) andStoria dell’ambiente. Una introduzione (2004, ‘An Introduction to Environmental History’), with Marco Armiero. Her next research projects are a transnational environmental history of petrochemicals, and a biography of Italian ecologist Laura Conti. Acknowledgments This book was born at the end of a long journey, both intellectual and geographical. I wish to thank the many people and institutions that have helped me on my way. Early support for the research in Naples was granted by the Institute of Stud- ies on Mediterranean Societies, University of Naples ‘l’Orientale’ and University of Naples Federico II. For those grants, I am very grateful to Gabriella Corona, Paolo Frascani, Vincenzo Giura, Paolo Malanima and Ilaria Zilli. That early research became an English manuscript in the course of three years which I spent in the US, first as visiting scholar at the Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies and then as S.V. Ciriacy Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. I am especially indebted to Jim Scott, for introducing my mind to an entire new world of intellectual possibilities; and to Carolyn Merchant, for her radical way of thinking ecology and for her maternal friendship. Many other people welcomed, sustained and helped me to get the best from my stay in the US, and to all I am truly thankful. I wish especially to thank Kay Mansfield for her precious support during my first year in Connecticut; Christine Meisner Rosen, Nancy Peluso, Isha Ray and Michael Watts for making possible and indeed very pleasant my stay in Berkeley and for the intellectual support I enjoyed from all them. Myrna Santiago, Angus Wright and Mary Mackey also warmly welcomed me and my family in California, and I am very happy I had the opportunity of making friends with them. I am also deeply indebted to Piero Bevilacqua, for the very idea of the topic of this book and for continued support down the years; and to Donald Worster, for the great privilege of his friendship and for the inspiration which I have en- joyed from him over many years. I am very grateful to Joan Martinez Alier and Marta Petrusewicz for the precious advice and support they granted me on many occasions; to John McNeill and to Nancy Peluso for having read provisory, often immature, pieces of this work and for the help they generously gave me in thinking it through. Part of Chapter 3 was first presented at the Berkeley Environmental Politics Workshop in November 2007 and is now included in Nature and History in Modern Italy, edited by Marco Armiero and Marcus Hall (Ohio University Press): I wish to thank Bern Gardener for his insightful commentary and all the participants for their appreciations and suggestions. Thanks also to the Land-Lab people of UC Berkeley in 2007–08 for their comments on other parts of the chapter. Gabrielle Bouleau, Costanza D’Elia, Rohan D’Souza, Marcus Hall, Giorgos Kallis, Paolo Macry, Marta Petrusewicz, have also read and commented upon pieces of this work and I have enjoyed their insights and advice. Special thanks go to Rosaria Bellucci, Gianluca Cellupica, Ferdinando Corradini, Silvio De Majo, Giulio De Martino and Stefano Mancini for facilitating my research in Isola del Liri. xii Acknowledgments The Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra generously granted additional funds for the English revision of the text: special thanks go to Mark Walters for his conscientious job and competent suggestions about river terminology. Last, but not least, I wish to thank my parents, Renata and Lorenzo, for their long-term, long-distance and unconditional support. This book is dedicated to Marco Armiero, who has shared with me this long journey through the Liri Valley and through life; and to Giulia, for the great adventure I have enjoyed meanwhile: that of growing with her. xiii Enclosing Water Introduction We need different ideas because we need different relationships Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’ I This book tells the story of the Industrial Revolution – probably the greatest trans- formation of society–nature relationships in the modern era – from the vantage point of a place called the Liri Valley: a roughly 10-mile region of gently sloping hills, watered by the River Liri and its tributary Fibreno, nestled within central Italy’s Apennines between Naples and Rome. The book looks at industrialisation from the banks of the river that moved the wheels of a factory system and from the standpoint of the people inhabiting and working the place1. Though challenged by many scholars and undermined by post-modernist critiques of universal meta-narratives, the concept of Industrial Revolution is main- tained here and reinterpreted in socio-ecological fashion. Of course, the idea of the Industrial Revolution as a unique and progressive paradigm of human history is faulty and does not account for the diversity of places, cultures and historical conditions2. Nevertheless, the idea that history is fragmented into a multitude of localities and differences also seems inadequate to make sense of the changes occurring in these same places. Political economy, the ‘large scale configuration of power’, as Donald Worster argues, is needed if we want to make sense of the connections between different scales and dimensions of society-nature interaction through time3. This book offers insights into how the global political economy of industrialisation and the natural environment of a particular river valley in the Mediterranean constituted each other, producing a new landscape and social formation: the ‘Manchester of the Two Sicilies’ – as the Liri Valley was called in the mid-1840s4. The book will present a prospect on a marginal Apennine area on Europe’s periphery and show how it was connected to the ideal and material reality of nineteenth century industrialisation.