Water Cultures, water knowledge, water conflicts: Rethinking water in the early modern period. Some notes from the Water Cultures Conference
From Firenze University Press Journal: Diciottesimo Secolo
Lavinia Maddaluno, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
In 2021 the United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR 2021) begged the question of what it meant to discuss the value of water, and what water was worth. The report distinguished between a market value, that is a monetary worth of water, a use value, otherwise said ‘utility’, which, as the report goes, «can be very different from the market price» and, finally, the «importance» of water, that is «the appreciation or emotional value we attach to a given good or service»1. Separating between different value domains allows to acknowledge that the process of water evaluation is not an abstract one, but is rather very bound to specific localities, scales, as well as cultural and emotional dimensions. However, the question of the value of water is far from being a thing of the present. In his lecture course in pub-lic economy (1769) at the Palatine Schools in Milan, the reformer, theorizer of the abolition of the death penalty, the Marquis Cesare Beccaria, devel-oped a theory of market value based on the assessment of offer and demand for specific things (cose) and goods (merci). In such a theory, water and its counterpart, air, figured as common things (cose comuni), available in great quantities, and definitely essential to human survival. And yet, Beccaria did not accord water and air any monetary value. The reformer was not alone in this take. In his treatise Della Moneta, the Neapolitan ambassador in Paris, political economist Ferdinando Galiani had claimed something similar. He argued that rarity and utility were two essential key factors in establishing value, and concluded that, for this very reason «water and air, most useful elements to human life, do not have any value, because they lack in rarity».Beccaria’s long-term collaborator and at-times enemy, the civil servant Pietro Verri also addressed this question in his Meditazioni sull’economia politica (1769/1771), highlighting how the «need for something» was not enough to attribute value. He claimed that, even though «there is nothing we need more than water and air», precisely for this reason water and air did not have any value4. However, the question of the value of water and air went beyond Italy and Lombardy. Back in early 18th-century France, the Director of the Royal Bank in Paris, John Law, had similarly maintained that «water is of great use, yet of little value, because the quantity of water is much greater than the demand for it», while the Scottish Adam Smith would later comment that «nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any-thing; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it»5.The present note will investigate different ways to understand water in the early modern and modern periods, by taking inspiration from the recent confer-ence The Water Cultures of Europe and the Mediter-ranean, 1500–1900. Held in Venice on the 13th, 14th and 15th September 2023, the conference was organised by the ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500–1900’s team, composed by Principal Investigator David Gen-tilcore, together with Gaia Bruno, Oscar Schiavone, Rachele Scuro, Salvatore Valenti, and myself. Given the multiplicity of research questions and methodological approaches mobilised by the conference participants, this paper is of course not an exhaustive review of how various strains of historiography have rethought key questions of the early modern period through the lens of water studies, but will rather offer a series of glimps-es into macro areas. For the purpose of this note, I have divided these macro areas into ‘Water knowledge’, ‘Water Cultures’, ‘Water conflicts’. These clusters corre-spond to the various panels of the conference, and are of course not separated from each other, instead presenting many points of contact, in terms of themes and method-ology. Due to constraints in space and the expertise of who is writing, not all sessions of the three-day conference have been given equal attention, despite being all included in the discussion.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/ds-15327
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ds/article/view/15327
