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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 Herakleion) Shariah court records, but also on a variety of published and unpublished archival material from Turkey, Greece, and France, it explores the socioeconomic aspects of water-resource exploitation in the island’s urban centers, analyzes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...

The Historical Journal recently published Kyle Gardner's "Moving Watersheds, Borderless Maps, and Imperial Geography in India's Northwestern Himalaya" . The abstract: This article uses the British colonial history of border making in northern India to examine the assumptions and contradictions at work in the theorizing, configuring, and mapping of frontiers and borders. It focuses, in particular, on the development of the ‘water-parting principle’ – wherein the edge of a watershed is considered to be the border – and how this principle was used to determine boundaries in the northwestern Himalaya, a region that had long-established notions of border points, but no borderlines. By the twentieth century, the water-parting principle would become the dominant boundary logic for demarcating borders in mountainous regions, and would be employed by statesmen, treaty editors, and boundary commissioners around the world. But for the northwestern Himalaya, a region that British...

Erum Sattar recently posted "From the Moors to the New World: Lessons from Dynamic Water Sharing for a Colonial-Era System in the Indus" . The abstract: This project is a close study of the legal and political aspects of management of water resources in semi-arid environments. The British in India laid the foundations of the modern irrigation system in what is now India and Pakistan. In semi-arid environments, the bulk of agriculture relies on irrigation, as it did in Spain under the Moors. We can observe a stark divide in the use of laws and institutions to manage natural resources in different societies, at different times and places. Some societies have managed in a way that achieved prosperity and long-term sustainability. Others have mismanaged so as to create ecological devastation and social stagnation. The Moors of Spain created a vibrant civilization in the Middle Ages that lasted nearly eight hundred years. One of the reasons for the dynamism of their civilization w...

Last August's Environment and History  had an article by Michele Campopiano, "Cooperation and Private Enterprise in Water Management in Iraq: Continuity and Change between the Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods (Sixth to Tenth Centuries) ". The article has a lot on the property system of the Sasanians and its relationship to water management. The abstract: This article shows that the management of water resources in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq (sixth to tenth centuries ad) implied the participation of local communities and the mutual cooperation of landholders. The organisation of water management in the Late Sasanian Period (sixth to seventh centuries) depended on a highly complex system of interaction between local communities, aristocratic rulers and the imperial bureaucracy. This interaction allowed the government to gather information from different regions of the empire and to understand the needs of the different stakeholders. As such, the system provided ...

In the last couple of posts in this series I suggested several directions of inquiry for uncovering the history of environmental law. In this final post in the series, I would like to tentatively offer some thoughts on why the historical exploration of environmental law matters. First of all, history can help us better understand current environmental law. For instance, David Driesen has recently advanced a positive theory of environmental law , attempting to explain its salient features, such as reliance on certain types of standards. Notably missing from his account are historical explanations for these aspects of environmental law, explanations which might be provided by works such as those of Morag-Levine .  Or take the argument of 'free market environmentalists' that private law would do a better job of protecting the environment than modern regulation; this type of argument could be checked against the historical experience of legal systems that have relied on private law...

On Friday we discussed the place of French and American law in Privy Council water decisions , leading up to the seminal 1858 case of  Miner v. Gilmour . Today we'll look at how Miner  became an inter-imperial authority, as Lord Kingsdown's summary of the relative rights of riparian owners was cited widely throughout the British Empire and beyond (for examples of the case's influence, see the article  on which this series is based). Though arising in a case in which the applicable law was the old French law of Canada East, on the imperial periphery, it was taken as a faithful exposition of the common law of England, the imperial metropolis. In the 1876 case of Lyon v. Fishmongers’ Company, for instance, dealing with the right of access of riparian owners to the River Thames, the House of Lords (at the time the highest court for cases arising in Britain itself) referred to it as one of ‘the best authorities’ on riparian doctrine. "a lord of appeal" [Colin Blackbu...

Yesterday I discussed the extensive use water law judicial decisions in the courts of Lower Canada, with its pre-revolutionary French property law, made of American sources . Today I discuss why they may have looked to a jurisdiction that had never belonged to the old empire from which the local law derived, and no longer belonged to the new empire of which Canada was now a part.  Hon. Justice T.C. Aylwin (Library and Archives Canada) In his dissent in the 1859 case of Boswell v. Denis Judge Aylwin indicated one reason why Canadians may have preferred American law over French in some cases. According to French law, a ‘navigable and floatable’ river was a public one, in which the public enjoyed rights that could not be impaired by the riparian owners. As the river in question in Boswell, the Jacques-Cartier, contained rapids and was therefore not ‘navigable’ by boat traffic, the majority of the court straightforwardly applied the French test and ruled that it could not be considered a ...

Continuing where yesterday's post left off: As the judges of the Privy Council recognized, the law governing the conflict between Miner and Gilmour over the waters of the Yamaska was not English law. Quebec, before being conquered by the British in 1760, had been part of the French Empire. A royal edict of 1663 had declared the law of New France to be the law as applied in the Parlement of Paris.  This law included royal ordinances, Roman law as expounded by jurists, and the sixteenth-century official collection of the customary law of Paris known as the Coutume de Paris. The Quebec Act of 1774, passed by the British Parliament a few years after the British conquest of Canada from France, declared that the laws of property existing in the province of Quebec pre-conquest would remain in force under British rule. The water law applicable to the case at hand was thus the law of the old French Empire, that is to say the law of ancien régime Paris, ironically no longer in force in Franc...

It seems I forgot to mention my own article when I posted it a while back.  "Riparian Rights in Lower Canada and Canada East: Inter-Imperial Legal Influences"  was published as chapter 4 of  Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930: Empires and Encounters   (Roland Cvetkovski & Volker Barth eds., Bloomsbury, 2015). I'll do a few posts based on the article now; for the full version, please see the book. One of the most dynamic areas of law in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world was that of water rights, or, as it was typically denoted then, “riparian rights”. This body of law dealt with the relative rights of owners of land adjacent to water—riparian land—to use the flowing waters, whether for power, irrigation, transportation, fishing, or waste disposal. The historical development of the law in this field in the nineteenth century has been analysed from several points of view, including economic property theory and Marxian legal history.  Transnational as...