Wetland projects were a leading example of improvement in action in early modern England, offering a counterpoint to many unrealised schemes and dreams that litter the archives. But such ventures were fraught with paradoxes: property rights were transgressed to make more certain ones, while drainage created new floods. Centring the engineers, investors, landowners, settlers, and labourers who propelled improvement on the ground, this chapter examines how their ambitions were altered and restricted by the polarised environmental politics that emerged in Hatfield Level. Improvement was a risky endeavour and the costs of conflict were high. Asking how contemporaries evaluated its ambiguous results in Hatfield Level, this chapter charts the revival of wetland improvement by the network of reformers that coalesced around the ‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib in the mid seventeenth century. The experience of conflict surfaced in debate about, and experiments with, technologies of improvement, which promised to marginalise social negotiation and environmental contingencies.

How did ambitious projects of wetland improvement give rise to a new kind of environmental politics in early modern England? This chapter first asks how such projects reconfigure understandings of when, where, and how environmental change took place in this period. Environmental acts were political, it argues, because they relied on and engendered relationships of power: decision-making institutions, laws, legitimacy, and – above all – negotiation and conflict. It next explores what kind of politics were at work in imagining, implementing, and contesting wetland improvement. In emphasising material and institutional progress, studies of ‘improvement’ and ‘the state’ have often overlooked the contingent processes through which productivity and power were made and disputed on the ground. Mobilising custom as a practice and right, wetland communities played a vital role in the trajectory of improvement. Conflict over improvement exposed the contested nature of political authority in seventeenth-century England and generated material landscapes of flux. Finally, this chapter examines how speech acted and actions spoke to remake wetlands via print, maps, institutions, and environments.

Hydraulic improvement aimed to abolish recurrent flooding in wetland commons and generate an environment capable of supporting intensive cultivation. In practice, however, the interventions of Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden and his collaborators created new flooding in unfamiliar patterns and places. As communities were left more exposed to risk and less able to adapt or recover, a fraught hydro-politics rippled out of drainage in Hatfield Level, pivoting on disputes over risk and responsibility. Displacing customary methods of water management, improved hydraulic systems generated institutional as well as environmental disruption. In 1635, a new sewer commission was established to manage Hatfield Level as a hydrological unit defined by improvement. Lacking legitimacy, it struggled to control flow, contain disorderly commoners, or compel cooperation from improving landowners. Wetland communities negotiated new risks by adapting customary practices, launching petitioning campaigns, and high-profile destruction of improved infrastructure during the English civil wars. In this context, water management became highly politicised and precariously balanced.

At the time and since, early modern wetlands have been subject to double vision: told as a tale of degradation and disaster or celebrated as a site of biodiversity and collective access. Violent Waters is a book about the politics of rapid, anthropogenic, environmental change in early modern England: a politics in which narratives about scarcity and abundance, the past and the future, justice and value became vital to struggles over wetlands. During projects of wetland improvement, environments were forged at the intersection between material conflicts over the distribution of resources and risk and political conflicts about flows of power.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Irrigation of crops and drainage of excess water have both positive and negative environmental consequences. Irrigation return flows degrade the quality of receiving streamflow as they transport pollutants. Although return flows cannot be entirely eliminated, they can be reduced by appropriate water management and improved conveyance and delivery systems. This chapter briefly discusses the importance of return flows and the pollutants transported by them.

Different types of crops require different types of climate and soil. Further, different crops and their optimum production have different irrigation requirements with respect to the frequency of irrigation, timing of irrigation, and amount of irrigation water per irrigation. The objective of this chapter is to briefly discuss the types of crops and their water requirements.

Two definitions of rock density are bulk density and solid matrix or skeleton density. Density depends on porosity, which is classified into open and closed porosity. Types of pores are defined by their interconnectivity, connectivity with surface, and geometry. Due to pore volume decrease with depth, sedimentary rocks possess three types of compressibility: bulk, matrix and pore volume compressibility. Density of rocks varies by density of constituting minerals and total porosity, and may be calculated as an arithmetic mean. Numerical modelling of rock densities may be done using Monte-Carlo simulations or on the basis of the software package Perple_X ’07. The capillary effect of fluid phase in pores depends on the wetting angle and specific surface energy. Drainage and imbibition are two processes that displace and saturate fluid in pores. Mercury porosimetry is a method to estimate pore volume by the intrusion of a nonwetting fluid. Gas-porosimetry relies on the known absorption of gas molecules on the pore surface, which is governed by the Gibbs equation. Kinetics of absorption/desorption processes are described by the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) equation. Focus Box 2.1: Models of porosity. Focus Box 2.2: Grain and atom arrangements in 3D. Focus Box 2.3: BET isotherm.

The sixth chapter examines how Native communities and haciendas adopted livestock rearing and, in particular, cattle ranching as a new economic activity within the lakes. Responding to the rise of the urban market for meat as well as the demographic decline within Native communities, residents of the chinampa districts expanded into the waters of the lakes in new and destabilizing ways. Alongside the chinampas, many of which survived and retained their value, haciendas and Native communities now fashioned pastures from the swamps. As they pushed further into the lake, pastoralists instituted new environmental management practices and constructed new hydraulic engineering works of their own. At the same time, the colonial administration, responding to renewed fears of flooding in the capital, increasingly intervened in the southern lakes’ hydrology. These new forces for change, when combined with higher rates of rainfall because of renewed climate extremes, undermined both the ecological autonomy and the flood defenses of the Nahua communities, portending of wholesale environmental transformation if not ruination on the eve of Mexico’s Independence.

shifts the perspective to the collective initiatives of inhabitants to secure health in their living and working environments. Those who lived in proximity to one another often shared infrastructures and hygienic routines. Court cases featuring neighbourly disputes reveal how inhabitants routinely tried to secure access to fresh water and hygienic domestic facilities such as cesspits, drainage pipes and latrines, and sought to ban stench and other nuisances from living environments. Expressed in a discourse revolving around damage and disturbance, local well-being – a “good neighbourhood” – was guaranteed by combining social harmony and material or infrastructural functionality, and resulted in forms of community formation and civic participation.

Taking as its focus the drained peatlands of the East Anglian fens, this chapter examines the formation and wastage of peat as a particular case study of human geological agency; a particular instance of the global transformation of a net carbon sink into a net carbon source. Here we see lived encounters with time depth that bring us face-to-face with temporal disjuncture: in particular, we see how the fenlands today find themselves locked-in to a present from which variation becomes unthinkable.