Building on Water: Venice, Holland, and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times (review)

Water management is a fascinating subject for historians of technology, providing, as it does, plenty of cases that indicate the relationship of technology to society's economic, legislative, and environmental aspects. Although water management may have diverse objectives pertinent to transportation, urban water supply, and flood control, Salvatore Ciriacono principally addresses irrigation and land reclamation in early modern Europe. Ciriacono's book was originally published in 1994 as Acque e agricoltura. Now, his comprehensive comparative study is available in English.

The Venetian Republic serves as a starting point and a constant frame of reference. From the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth and eighteenth, capitalistic agriculture developed vigorously in northern Italy. So did land reclamation in the terra firma, the mainland territories of the Venetian Republic. Even during the so-called crisis of the seventeenth century, the pace of irrigation development and land reclamation slowed only briefly. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, the limits of agricultural growth had become evident. Ciriacono judges that irrigation in the Veneto remained less developed than that of more advanced regions such as Lombardy.

What explains the situation in the Veneto? Ciriacono highlights the continuing focus on the Lagoon of Venice in Venetian water-management policies. Preservation of the lagoon was regarded as vital for the prosperity of Venice as a maritime power, and Ciriacono argues that works proposed for a canal or watercourse were automatically sacrificed if they were seen as posing any sort of threat to the lagoon. Hence, preoccupation with the lagoon was responsible for the relative backwardness of irrigation in the Veneto.

Ciriacono also poses a comparison between the Venetian situation and that of the Netherlands in terms of technical development, legislation, entrepreneurship, and, last, land reclamation. While the two states are often considered to be unique, one can also recognize remarkable parallels between them—the stagnation of land reclamation in the eighteenth century, for example, and the simultaneous construction of stone sea defenses as a countermeasure against the appearance of a sort of marine worm. In the last chapter, Ciriacono describes the diffusion of Dutch technology to Germany, France, and England, and its impact on the agricultural development of those countries.

As for technology, Ciriacono characterizes the tendency of Venetian hydraulic experts to take a more theoretical stance and to focus on the inherent characteristics of river hydraulics, such as the determination of flow speed, while the Dutch were more empirical and more practical, concentrating on improving windmills or dredgers. This would be true if he used the word "Holland" in a narrow sense, i.e., as a western province of the Republic of the Netherlands. But he also mentions other regions, such as Zeeland and Drenthe, apparently intending to equate "the Netherlands" with "Holland." If so, he should have dealt not only with drainage and dredging techniques, but also with the improvement of the Rhine system, where the Dutch experts were probably faced with problems and difficulties similar to those of their Italian counterparts.

Still, Ciriacono is quite correct in emphasizing that hydraulics could capture the attention of central governments and hold a central place in eighteenth-century science because water was so essential to transportation and as an agricultural resource and a source of energy. All in all, this work has the merit of presenting an overview of the development of hydraulic works in early modern Europe, clearing a pathway for further comparative studies.