Top 100 environmental blog

I'm happy to report that Feedspot has named Environment, Law, and History one of the top 100 environmental blogs. Thanks to all of you - the readers, writers, commenters, mentioners, and so on - who made it happen!

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Running water for the officials, rainwater for the poor

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Venetian aqueduct in Crete The latest issue of Water History  has an article by Yannis Spyropoulos, "Running water for the officials, rainwater for the poor: symbolic use and control of water in early modern Ottoman Crete" . The abstract: This paper deals with the issue of water management on the island of Crete from the beginning of the Ottoman–Venetian war in 1645 to the beginning of its Egyptian administration in 1830. Based primarily on information given by Kandiye’s (mod. Herakleion) Shariah court records, but also on a variety of published and unpublished archival material from Turkey, Greece, and France, it explores the socioeconomic aspects of water-resource exploitation in the island’s urban centers, analyzes the involvement of various local and imperial actors in water management, and locates the struggles created in the above-mentioned processes. Through a detailed analysis of the challenges faced by the administration and the population of an insular area with lim
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Enclosure in Israel and Palestine

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In developments close to home, the latest issue of the New York Review of Books  has a review by Raja Shehadeh of Gary Fields's Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror  (U. California Press, 2017). Some excerpts: Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of legal developments in the Ottoman Empire—which ruled Palestine until 1917—had enabled the growth of... large land holdings. They included the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which attempted to eliminate the musha system, whereby land was held in common, and required that the cultivator-turned-owner register his land with Treasury officials. ***** The legal processes the Ottomans had begun were continued in the years after the end of their rule—first by the British military occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1922, and then when the League of Nations granted the British a mandate over Palestine from 1922 to 1948. During both periods, the British continued to revise the land laws with a vie
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Savagery, civilization, and property III: The commons theorists

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In the last post in this series , we looked at the way early modern "stadial theory" connected between stages of civilization and property regimes. Now let us examine some of the classics of modern commons theory, noting the fondness of theorists for stories reminiscent of various aspects of stadial theory. I wish to highlight here not simply that commons theorists of many stripes tend to connect pressure on resources to property regimes, as unanimity on this point could plausibly be explained by observations of a pervasive phenomenon. It is rather the connection of these two parameters — pressure and property — with the early modern idea of civilizational stages characterized by hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and sometimes commerce, that I find striking. Whether seeing these stages in terms of the march of Progress or a fall from Edenic bliss, nearly all commons theorists seem to be attracted to the basic narrative of stadial theory. Garret Hardinʼs “Tragedy of the Commo
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