Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and Its Legacy (review)

The works of Thomas F. Glick on irrigation and the history of technology are well known to both historians of technology and those who specialize in the history of medieval Spain. He first became known for his Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) and for a later, comparative work, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). The latter book is considered a classic on Spanish medievalism, but its interest extends considerably beyond the peninsula. The topic concerns all who are interested in comparing Christian and Muslim civilizations in their cultural and social dimensions. Glick’s most important concern is always social history. As he explains in the introduction to this volume, he seeks to look at big landscapes through small windows, that is, to understand social structures through the slant of their technological foundations. For Glick, irrigation technology constitutes an ideal observation point to reveal the specifics of a culture. As much as irrigation engenders conflicts, it also assures and fosters cooperation.

Fourteen of the seventeen studies in this collection are in English; five of the English articles were translated from Spanish. The remaining three studies are in Spanish, as originally published. Reproduced from essays originally published between 1968 and 1995, they reflect the author’s scientific and intellectual journey. They have, nonetheless, been organized not chronologically but thematically. The first group of essays is about methodological consequences. One contribution from the Fifth International Symposium of the History of Arabian Science, held in Granada in 1992, shows the author’s mastery of a wide bibliography ranging from Wittfogels’ classical interpretations of Asian despotism to Patricia Crone’s recent views on the evolution of Muslim societies. This large body of information is put into a useful, critical perspective. Two other articles in the same section concern the work of Arthur Maas. Maas made a comparative study of hydraulic systems from the irrigators’ viewpoint and not the state’s, as Wittfogel had done. Both articles also consider more recent Spanish work, in particular that of Miguel Barcelo and his team at the Universidad Autonome de Barcelone. Barcelo focused on the irrigated soil of the Baléares, which pushes the irrigator’s point of view to its extreme.

The same central themes are found throughout other contributions. Topics include hydraulic techniques (canals, measuring time, dredgers, mills), the institutions that regulate irrigation (their origin, conflict resolution, the organization of water courses in one locality in the province of Almeria), and the descendants of medieval institutions outside the Spanish context (two examples of transferring institutions from the Iberian Peninsula to Texas and India). The term “scientific journey” was used earlier in this review. Glick’s inquiry developed parallel to a whole series of work in Spain on the currently much-studied question of irrigated agriculture and the hydraulic archaeology in the Muslim tradition. He had, in his 1970 book, anticipated this research movement and given it its first impetus. With great intellectual flexibility and honesty, Glick then joined the movement, adjusting his first hypothesis as necessary in his later work. In this way, he tried to amend his initial interpretation of the Valencian irrigation system. He had first considered it Syrian because of its resemblance to the system of the Ghuta of Damascus, but he was later influenced by my own proposals of a “Berberization” and not an “Arabization” of the irrigated regions of Valencia. Glick also later considered Karl Butzer’s and Juan Mateu’s ideas of classifying Valencian irrigation systems in terms of their size. The classification will perhaps resolve certain contradictions between the Roman and Arabic theses regarding the origins of these irrigation systems.

Because of their publication dates, several works were obviously not influenced by the latest research developments on these conflicting points. Thus the 1977 article on the dredgers does not address the 1987 work of André Bazzana, Salvador...