Notably, the nineteenth century saw the introduction of new dredging machines. Made of steel, powered by coal, and moved by steam, these dredging machines were much more efficient than their wooden, human-powered precursors. They could be used to excavate soil in order to dig canals, or they could be built into ships and used to deepen a river or a bay. Before the nineteenth century, this work was done by men with shovels and buckets. With new technology like the steam dredge, new projects suddenly became possible for the first time. The second change in the nineteenth century had to do with new sources of financing for these projects. Industrialization combined with population growth had created economic growth in Western Europe. This led to the emergence of a new class of investors—people looking for ways to invest their surplus income. Projects to manipulate the hydrosphere promised to be very lucrative, and so they attracted money from investors hoping to make big gains. As a result of this change, not only was there new technology in the nineteenth century, but there was also the capital to undertake bigger projects than ever before. Finally, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new attitude. The spirit of the age was one of progress. With so many advances in science and engineering, there was a sense that humanity was advancing into a new era in which the relationship between humans and their environment could be redefined. There was a new optimism that people were not limited by the world they inherited; they could wage a war against the imperfections of nature.
Indeed, nineteenth- and twentieth-century water management projects were often articulated as a kind of warfare,fodder sprouting system with nature seen as an enemy to be conquered.This rhetoric had many historical antecedents, such as Frederick the Great’s famous proclamation upon the completion of the project to drain the Oder Marshes in 1753: “Here I have conquered a province in peace.”Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, rhetoric of a war against nature became ubiquitous. It was now possible to manipulate the physical landscape unlike ever before, and with this power came a new optimism that humans could wage war against the natural world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engineers throughout Europe straightened rivers, dredged canals, drained wetlands, and constructed dams and reservoirs at an unprecedented scale. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German engineers tamed the wild Rhine—a “labyrinth of waterways and islands” that changed course from year to year—into a shorter, straighter, and more predictable single channel.The period from the 1880s to the middle of the twentieth century was also the “age of dam building” in Germany, motivated by the idea that, in some places, nature provided lakes, while in others, rocky basins required human effort to be “complete[d].”In Italy, wetlands were drained in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to create more land for capitalist agriculture and—misguidedly— to combat malaria.The most notable case in the nineteenth century—and one that bears a striking resemblance to the project to drain Lake Kopaïs discussed in later chapters—is the draining of Lake Fucino. The third-largest lake in Italy at the time, it covered 155 square km of the plains of Abruzzo. From 1862 to 1875, Prince Alessandro Torlonia drained Fucino and converted it into agricultural land.
For generations, the lake had been used by local fishermen. The draining of Fucino was followed by a “draining frenzy” in the Po Plain and the fascist-era draining of the Pontine Marshes.Europeans exported their conquest of nature to the developing and colonized world in the form of foreign investment. The successful completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 by Ferdinand de Lesseps and his Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez sparked an enthusiasm for foreign investment in navigation canals. By the time he officially announced his next project—a canal through the Isthmus of Panama—founders’ shares of the Suez company, initially priced at 5,000 francs each, were valued at 380,000 francs per share. Investors anticipated similar profits for the Panama Canal, and when de Lesseps issued public shares of his Compagnie universelle du canal interocéanique de Panama in the 1880s, it quickly became the mostly widely-held stock of any ever before issued.The conquest of nature arrived in Greece in the 1880s. As in the colonized world, it was brought by Europeans searching for opportunities for investment. Although the Kingdom of Greece was an independent country and not a colony, in several respects the country’s experience in the nineteenth century resembled that of the colonized world, as many have argued.With respect to the development of infrastructure, Greece could not afford to fund its own modernization and like the colonized world relied on foreign investment.In the 1880s, the modernizing fervor of the government of Harilaos Trikoupis and Greece’s renewed access to foreign credit markets for the first time in half a century made infrastructural development a possibility.
Meanwhile, an economic depression in Europe caused European entrepreneurs to look abroad for investment opportunities.The Corinth Canal, dredged through the Isthmus of Corinth from 1882 to 1893, was begun by a French company—the Société internationale du canal maritime de Corinthe—led by the Hungarian general-cum-entrepreneur István Türr and the Hungarian engineer Béla Gerster, both of whom had been involved in the Panama Canal project.In 1890, the company declared bankruptcy, and a Greek company led by Andreas Syngros took over for the failed French company, resumed the works in 1890, and finished the canal in 1893.The 1880s was also the railroad decade in Greece with railways built all over the country, mostly by a group called the Delegation of French Engineers.From the time Trikoupis first became prime minister until the time of his death in 1896, the length of the country’s railways increased from 12 kilometers to almost 1,000 kilometers.These and other infrastructure projects in Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been studied primarily from an economic perspective. They have been studied for the ways they impacted the Greek economy—both by boosting it in the nineteenth century and by causing it to lag in the twentieth century under the weight of foreign loans. The social and environmental aspects of these infrastructure projects have received less study. This dissertation focuses on a subset of the “conquest of nature” projects in Greece in the late nineteenth century, i.e. those made to strengthen intensive, commercial agriculture, and I examine the social and environmental effects. Research on the globalization of agricultural production has demonstrated that it had had large-scale and often permanent environmental effects including resource depletion, upland erosion, and the elimination of ecosystems. As J.R. McNeill has written, when global demand for a resource is concentrated on a small region, the effect on that region’s ecology can be “roughly analogous to the focusing of the sun’s rays on a single point, as children do with a magnifying glass in order to set a leaf on fire.”Evidence suggests that globalization had a similar impact on the Mediterranean environment, but the scale and broader consequences remain unknown. Case studies of economic history and historical demography in small regions in Greece have indicated that land use transformed dramatically during this period to create new land to grow crops for export. To support increasing global demand for olives, cultivators on Lesvos transformed the landscape of the island by stretching terraces up into the hills to exploit land that otherwise would not be ideal for agriculture. Scholars who have studied landscape change on the island note that this process of terracing began in the eighteenth century, but it expanded greatly in the second half of the nineteenth century.There is reason to think that terracing on Lesvos is representative of a larger regional trend. As Horden and Purcell write, “The terraces that we see today in Italy or Greece derive largely from the later nineteenth century. Widespread rural overpopulation was combined with new opportunities for the exchange of Mediterranean tree-products in a conjunction that has only occasionally been found in the more recent past…”Yet more research is required on the local scale to determine the chronology, motivations,microgreen fodder system and extent of terracing in Greece and the Mediterranean during the commercial agriculture boom of the later nineteenth century.
Other case studies have demonstrated how commercial agriculture created the impetus and the capital to drain lowland swamps and turn land that was not being used or was being used for other purposes into agricultural land for the intensive cultivation of cash crops. In the municipality of Krathis on the northern coast of the Peloponnese, rural populations drained lowland swamps to plant currant vineyards, and a society based on seasonally transhumant pastoralism changed into one based on settled viticulture.In another case study, we see that villagers from the mountainous inland Peloponnese entered into planting agreements with an elite landowner in Pirgos to clear his land and plant it with currant vineyards.The long term effects of these transformations have similarly received little study, although the work that has been done demonstrates the importance of this topic. In the Pindos mountains in Northern Greece and in other parts of the Mediterranean region, over-use of the land caused erosion, leading to permanent environmental degradation.Upland settlement and lowland colonization were prevalent in the broader Mediterranean region as well. J. R. McNeill argues that demographic trends and environmental changes imposed constraints on the altitudes at which Mediterranean populations could settle. He examined the evidence from five Mediterranean mountain regions: the Rif Mountains in Morocco, the Sierra Nevada and Alpujarra in Spain, the Lucanian Apennines in Italy, the Western Taurus mountains in Anatolia, and the Pindos Mountains in northern Greece. From 1800 to 1950, he argued, the dual processes of population overshoot and population “undershoot” worked in tandem to render a greater segment of the environment uninhabitable desert. First, a demographic boom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused overshoot, meaning the populations of Mediterranean mountains grew beyond the land’s carrying capacity, or its ability to sustain life given its resources.As a result, from 1800 to 1950, there was “massive deforestation and soil erosion” in the mountains of the Mediterranean.These two processes created lowland marshes ideal for mosquitoes, thereby causing the malaria stratum to rise, intensifying the already severe overshoot in the mountains.Most people were forced to live between 500 and 1,800 meters above sea level, i.e. between the malaria stratum and the tree line. The rise of malaria “made lowlands into deserts. Only the foolhardy and the desperate ventured down except in the winter months.” Therefore, as the tree line descended due to deforestation in the mountains, the malaria stratum rose, and Mediterranean populations were constrained to settle in the highlands, “squeezed between a rock and a hard place that were slowly moving closer and closer together.”As the amount of arable land decreased, many people were forced to leave. The result was massive emigration, especially to Mediterranean port cities, to Northern Europe, and to the Americas. This triggered a second process: “undershoot.” Mediterranean mountain regions have a minimum population threshold, below which “terraces and irrigation cannot be maintained, agriculture becomes noticeably less productive, and the survival of one and all is imperiled…” Emigration, therefore, accelerated desertification.It was not until after the Second World War that malaria was eradicated and widespread colonization of the lowland plains was once again possible. By shifting focus to the environmental changes made during this period to suit foreign demand, the present study emphasizes an often-overlooked force that impacted the trajectory of development in Mediterranean Europe. Based largely on historical ecology, scholars have posited a unified Mediterranean basin of micro-ecologies, rendered inter-dependent through prolific trade, where residents practiced risk-averse, subsistence-directed agriculture. Yet scholarship has had difficulty applying this model to the modern era, when the arrival of the steam ship and the nation-state disintegrated the sea’s littoral.In the twentieth century, the region is divided into national histories, but in the nineteenth century, Mediterranean environmental history is not well understood. As one scholar has recently put it, the nineteenth century is “the orphan of Mediterranean historiography.”My case studies in Greece, where the shift from risk-averse, “traditional” Mediterranean agriculture to monocultural, capitalist agriculture was swift and dramatic, improve historical understanding of modernity in the Mediterranean region.