HISTORY OF THE ALPS, 1500 - 1900: ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT, AND SOCIETY

5. Environment and Development

114 5 Environment and Development “Alps: Alpes is the term used by Strabo, Ptolemy, Herodianus, Pliny, Caesar, and other Greek and Latin writers to refer to the high mountain chain of 188 miles in length that separates Italy from Germany, France, and the Swiss confederacy.” Thus was informed the elite circle of readers of the first volume of the Helvetisches Lexikon, published in 1747. The individual sections of these high mountains, continued the entry, are known by various names and have been discussed in particular by Josias Simler. In his treatise, the learned scholar from Zurich described in detail the “names, length, width, and height” of the Alps, and referred to “Hannibal’s first crossing of them, and to other difficult crossings, undertaken in our days, and to peoples, bodies of water, trees, plants, and animals.”1 In certain ways the Alpine space is among those areas in which the relationship between the environment and development is especially open to observation—a theme whose importance extends to many disciplines at present. On the one hand, that to which we typically refer as ‘the environment’ makes its flashy appearance in the world of the mountains, with their “bodies of water, trees, plants, and animals.” On the other hand the Alps are situated at the intersection of countries animated Environment and Development 115 by lively research activities. Already during the period that concerns us here, many serious and methodological studies about the mountains had been written. Some of these became well-known, and continued to be discussed for quite a while, such as Simler’s De Alpibus Commentarius (1574), or the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel on Die Alpen inmitten der geschichtlichen Bewegungen (1896) (The Alps in the Midst of Historical Movements). Of course, the contexts in which scholars from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries operated were very different from the conditions of present-day research. For example, the ancient canon, “the Greek and Latin writers ,” were known and appreciated in ways that are difficult to understand today. But the strangeness of natural phenomena and human settlements located only a short distance away from their own cultural centers aroused in many a kind of personal and empirical curiosity. The development and specialization of scholarly research that took place in the nineteenth and (above all) twentieth centuries led to rapid changes in the size of available bodies of knowledge, and in the models that structured this knowledge. Naturalists and geographers tell us that today the Alps are “the best researched mountain space in the world.”2 From an historical perspective, however, one must acknowledge that it is still difficult to construct a comprehensive picture of the demographic and economic development of this area, even if one only begins at the end of the Middle Ages. Such a picture is important, though, since the historical discipline is particularly committed to the reconstruction and interpretation of how the conditions of human society changed over time. The preceding chapters have discussed the history of population levels, of agriculture, and of cities in the Alpine space. Now it is time to pause, assess, and take into account the ways in which these different sectors related to one another. Next we will extend this clarification to relations between the Alps and surrounding areas. Then the theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed. This chapter once again confronts us with the limitations of the available historical records, but it also shows that the theme of environment and development lends itself to examination from multiple perspectives. We need to ask ourselves which perspective makes most sense in each given context. An intermediate assessment: differentiated growth In order to focus on the importance of environmental factors, we must first keep in mind the long-term tendencies that have already been identified. From 1500 to 1900 the Alps underwent a process of demographic, agricultural, and urban expansion (1); Chapter Five 116 the growth that occurred after 1700 differed from that of the previous two centuries in that it was often slower in the higher elevations than in low-altitude regions (2) and slower in the Alps in general than in surrounding areas (3). The importance of these general tendencies should not be overestimated, since in each period one could find areas that developed differently. Trends such as these become apparent when observing a vast area over the long term, which is quite a challenge given the fragmentary nature of...