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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 ...

After beginning the digital library of historical environmental law with works from the last few hundred years, we go back in time this week to the fourteenth century and the  Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis  (1355,  1576 edition (source of the images in this post) here ) of the great medieval Italian jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato. As Bartolus explained at the beginning of the work, he was inspired to write the book while on vacation near Perugia, despite his attempts to enjoy his vacation and stay away from legal scholarship: This river [Tiber]... circles that splendid mountain on which the city of Perugia is situated and while flowing a great distance through its district, the river itself is bordered by plains, hills and similar places. These places are also well inhabited, enhanced with many beautiful buildings and luscious orchards bearing lots of fruit. Thus, when I was resting from my lecturing and in order to relax, was travelling towards a certain villa situated near ...

Barada River in Damascus Yehoshua Frenkel, a professor at University of Haifa and member of our local environmental history forum , recently pointed me to a 2011 chapter by Boaz Shoshan on water law, "Mini-Dramas by the Water: On Irrigation Rights and Disputes in Fifteenth-Century Damsacus" . The abstract: Apart from discussions of matters of irrigation in legal works, medieval sources provide us with little information on the human dynamics and social interaction that are an integral part of irrigation systems. Some cases involving water were straightforward, whereas others were not. A laconic statement about a settlement ( ṣulḥ ) that was reached in Muḥarram 886/March 1481, in the presence of the viceroy of Damascus and the chief qāḍīs, between one Kamāl al-Dīn and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muḥawjib concerning water that was coercively ( zulman ) diverted from the al-Manshīya river canal, provides us with only a faint echo about such conflict. Fortunately, on other occasions of wate...

"Diploma" of Frederick Barbarossa granting navigation rights to the monastery of San Carpoforo di Como (1159) I recently came across Acque della Lombardia Medievale,  apparently the catalog for an exhibition held by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano in 2015 . (If you're ever in Milan, don't miss the associated Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.) The editors, Federico Gallo and Rita Pezzola, write: According to Roman law, one defines every permanent water-course as " publicum " whether it was navigable or not, and only rivulets and streams were considered private. During the Middle Ages and in particular in the 10th and 11th centuries, we find more and more imperial and royal diplomas giving grants and donations related to stretches of rovers: they refer to the construction of ports and mills and to fishing and navigating rights. Thus the principle, or better the custom, of considering some parts of a river as capitalized (today we would say "privatized") was...

Gonzalo Rodriguez recently posted "Protecting Inland Waterways: From the Institutes of Gaius to Magna Carta" . The abstract: No single factor has had a more significant effect on the ebbs and flows of history than water. Water creates civilizations, and water brings them to extinction. Even today, thousands of years after we learned to harness the power of water, we continue to struggle in determining how to prioritize competing uses of water resources, how to make water available to all who need it, and how to protect it. Yet, these are questions that humans have faced since as long as history dares to recollect. What factors guide civilizations in their decision whether, and to what extent, to regulate and protect inland waterways? This article looks at four legal codes from three distinct civilizations: From the Romans, The Institutes of Gaius and the Corpus Juris Civilis; from the Visigoth Kingdom, the Visigothic Code; and from the English, Magna Carta. This article propo...