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  • Building on the Water: Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times
  • James S. Grubb
Building on the Water: Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times. By Salvatore Ciriacono (New York, Berghahn Books, 2006) 308 pp. $80.00

Because the historiography of the early modern period has usually been highly sensitive to contemporary debates in European and American societies, such issues as civil rights, women's rights, the status of the marginal and excluded, and the like have quickly found analog in history writing. The environmental movement, however, has not been so blessed, at least in the English-speaking world. Part of the lag may be inherent in the discipline: Environmental history requires technical training that is not routinely available in graduate programs. Additionally, environmental history builds upon existing subfields—history of technology, economic history, and historical geography—that are often underrepresented in mainstream history departments.

Ciriacono's Building on Water is a doubly welcome addition to the field, both as an able work in its own right and as an introduction to key themes and concepts in environmental history. The title, however, is somewhat misleading: Ciriacono has far more to say about Veneto than Holland, and much less about the Venetian lagoon proper. Moreover, "landscape" in this book refers to drainage, reclamation, and irrigation rather than, as in more culturally oriented studies, the response to, and conceptualization of, the natural environment. But each of the first three chapters contains an extensive summary and citation of works about agronomy and hydraulics from the whole of Europe (with an occasional nod to Arab authors), as well as constant comparison with other regions, [End Page 457] notably Lombardy and Spain. The fourth chapter directly compares the Venetian and Dutch experiences, and the fifth and final chapter, on technology transfers from Holland to all of northern Europe, expands the inquiry even further. Beyond the immediate argument, the book presents a full intellectual context, with myriad points of comparison, and a robust bibliography.

Although Ciriacono deliberately avoids the more polemically charged debates about Venice and Holland—refeudalization and decadence, most notably—in the end, he is concerned with relative development there and throughout Europe. The overall outline of his account is not surprising: Venetian precocity eventually followed by a "much more conservative and limited" approach and a fondness for "scientific and theoretical problems posed by hydraulics," more conducive to abstract discussion than the development of practical solutions (7, 12). Venice led the way through the sixteenth century, but the Dutch seized the initiative in the seventeenth and did not relinquish it. Nor does the arc of European economic development that Ciriacono traces attempt radical revision: a strong sixteenth century, a disastrous first half of the seventeenth century, a modest recovery after 1650, and a return to dynamic growth in the eighteenth century.

But Ciriacono brings to this familiar terrain sensitivity to regional variation, to the delicate interplay of many factors (technology, finance, organization and direction, hydrology, geology, and social/political orderings) that led to local successes and failures of reclamation schemes. Furthermore, despite the massive detail, the overall line of his argument is never far below the surface. The book has much to offer students of agriculture, land use, and land exploitation, about every region of Europe where water management was a priority or indeed a necessity.

James S. Grubb
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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