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Book Review
| Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World (19th-20th Centuries). Edited by Marco Armiero. Naples: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Istituto de Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, 2006. 237 pp. Paper 25.00 (Euro).
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| This book consists of an introduction by the editor and fifteen short chapters, fourteen of which deal with the Mediterranean world. The exception is the initial chapter, by Donald Worster, which makes the case for the utility, indeed necessity, of environmental history in general. The fourteen chapters devoted to the Mediterranean include one on contemporary issues surrounding water use and water policy in Jordan, and thirteen on Mediterranean Europe. Eight of these deal wholly or mainly with Italy. Albania, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Croatia also receive some attention. The themes represented are mainly rural ones—woods, water, mountains, and so forth—considered as material realities or as objects of legal and administrative action. There is rather little about the cultural and intellectual sides of environmental history. In this respect it is, I believe, representative of environmental history as typically practiced in Italy and Spain. |
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The volume is the result of a conference hosted by the Istituto de Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, from which several of the authors hail. It gives a fair impression of what Mediterranean scholars, especially Italian ones, are up to in the field of environmental history. In his introduction, Armiero states that part of the goal of the book, and the reason it appears in English, is to bring modern environmental history in southern Europe to the attention of scholars elsewhere who might not read Italian, Spanish, and other languages of the region. It is also intended to help scholars within the region, but from different countries, profit from one another's work. |
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It may well succeed on both counts. However, readers will have to overcome two obstacles. The first is that in some of the chapters, the English is far from natural and in a few places hard to understand. This is a small problem; anyone intent on learning from these chapters will be able to surmount it. The second obstacle is that many of the chapters are written not for fellow scholars in other countries, but for colleagues who already know the national context relevant to the chapter. To choose one of several possible examples, the chapter on Portuguese water management, by Maria Cristina Dias Joanaz de Melo, assumes readers know the significance of the military coup of 1851, what the "rice question" of the 1850s was, and so forth. No doubt these are familiar matters to all historians of Portugal, and perhaps to all Portuguese schoolchildren. But for those readers who are not properly versed in Portuguese history, the chapter is a bit hard to follow because contextual knowledge is assumed and not provided. Of course works in American environmental history are often written on the assumption that readers already know what the New Deal or Reconstruction refer to, with no thought to how baffling these terms might be for uninitiated audiences. |
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In my view, the two most interesting themes raised in this book are the role of energy in southern European history and the relationships between fascism and nature. In the age of industrialization, southern Europe stood at a disadvantage as it had little coal. Early Italian industrialization rested on water power; after the 1940s, on Middle Eastern oil. But Italy, and the Mediterranean in general (an exception could be made for pockets of northern Spain powered by Asturias coal) could not compete with northern and central Europe in heavy industry. Energy questions turn up in several chapters. |
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Links between fascism and nature, real and imagined, is a subject that historians of German environmentalism have plumbed with profit. Here Wilko Graf von Hardenberg provides a preliminary investigation of the theme for southern Europe, focusing mainly on Italy but with attention also to Greece, Spain, and Portugal, all of which featured more or less fascist regimes for years or decades. His chapter is a tour d'horizon that suggests many interesting avenues for further exploration. |
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The book also sheds light on the longstanding debate about the chronologies of deforestation and erosion in Mediterranean landscapes. Walter Palmieri's chapter on landslides in southern Italy lays stress upon the revolutionary land use changes and population pressures of the nineteenth century; so does a chapter on a Croatian mountain by Borna Fürst-Bjeliå and Sanja Lozi. Oliver Rackham, in a concluding chapter, offers a contrasting view, that "in the distant past environmental changes may have been more extreme, and landscape changes more drastic, than any observed in the last 200 years" (p. 237). Aficionados of iconoclastic scholarship will especially enjoy page 232, on which Rackham seems to say that globalization brought wheat to Italy in the early twentieth century. |
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In general, this book is highly recommended for all those who wish to get a sense of current work in southern European environmental history. |
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J. R. McNeill teaches international environmental history at Georgetown University. He is the author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (W.W. Norton, 2000) and the forthcoming book Epidemics and Geopolitics in the American Tropics, 1640–1920 (Cambridge, 2008). |
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