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Venetian aqueduct in Crete The latest issue of Water History  has an article by Yannis Spyropoulos, "Running water for the officials, rainwater for the poor: symbolic use and control of water in early modern Ottoman Crete" . The abstract: This paper deals with the issue of water management on the island of Crete from the beginning of the Ottoman–Venetian war in 1645 to the beginning of its Egyptian administration in 1830. Based primarily on information given by Kandiye’s (mod. Herakleion) Shariah court records, but also on a variety of published and unpublished archival material from Turkey, Greece, and France, it explores the socioeconomic aspects of water-resource exploitation in the island’s urban centers, analyzes the involvement of various local and imperial actors in water management, and locates the struggles created in the above-mentioned processes. Through a detailed analysis of the challenges faced by the administration and the population of an insular area with lim...

In the common-law world, historical and legal argument are frequently intertwined, a phenomenon reflected in the title of this week's addition to the digital library of historical environmental law , Stuart A. Moore's A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto , published in London by Stevens & Haynes in 1888 ( available on the Internet Archive and in Gale's The Making of Modern Law ). Moore's work was part of a wave of antiquarian interest in early writings on property rights in the seashore (today this topic would be labeled "public trust doctrine") that seems to have been motivated largely by legal and economic issues at stake during Britain's industrial revolution. So in addition to his treatment of a legal manuscript by the Elizabethan-era mathematician Thomas Digges and other early sources , Moore reproduced in his work "A New Treatise by Sir Matthew Hale, from a MS. in his Handwriting", which Moore believed to be an early ...

I recently came across Tapio Katko's Finnish Water Services: Experiences in Global Perspectives (Finnish Assn. of Water Utilities, 2016). It's been reviewed in several journals; here are some excerpts from Glen O'Hara's review in Scandanavian Economic History Review  (references to page numbers omitted): Particularly impressive sections include those on the post-Second World War growth of transnational water governance systems through the auspices of the United Nations, including the International Hydrological Decade of 1965–1974, the subsequent International Hydrological Programme and the regional Baltic agreements that followed the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and then, in a further burst of maritime co-operation, after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Perhaps because of Finland’s small population, and her traditional Nordic role within the international aid and development network, the international situation plays a key role in thi...

(Continuing the series on water rights :) Whatever property regime applies to water, the public often retains certain rights in the resource. Thus, for instance, in American law, though a river's water may be owned by riparian landowners or appropriators, the federal government retains a "navigation servitude" in the water with which private owners (and states) cannot interfere ( Trelease, 1965 ). Joseph Sax Recent decades have seen much discussion of the "public trust doctrine", rules that allow public interests, especially environmental ones, to trump the normal property rules in water. Though the doctrine has its roots in the traditional civil and common law, particularly with regard to tidelands ( Selvin, 1980 ), its modern form was first articulated by Joseph Sax in a highly influential article (1970) , in which he argued that the historical doctrine should be developed to encourage courts to subject actions that harm the environment to strict scrutiny. In ...

(Continuing the series on water rights :) The empirical work of Ostrom ( 1990 ; Ostrom and Gardner, 1993 ) and others on institutions for governing commons resources has shown that, in practice, common property can be highly successful in managing water resources, depending on the structure and functioning of the institutions involved. She and her collaborators summed up their conclusions ( Ostrom et al., 2010 ): Elinor Ostrom Researchers usually distinguish four basic types of governance systems, defined in terms of who controls access to resources: private property, government property, common property, and open access (i.e., no one's property). Research has consistently shown the inefficient outcomes of open access since open access almost always leads to destruction of any resource that is in great demand. This is the problem identified in Hardin's famous essay, although he called open access "commons," which led to substantial subsequent confusion. The other thre...

(Continuing the series on water rights - the first installment was here .) Property in water takes a great variety of forms. Many countries' laws state that all water is the property of the public or the state ( Trelease, 1957 ; Cumyn, 2007 ; Sun, 2009 ; Schorr, 2013 ). Most civil law countries, following Roman law, distinguish between public and private waters. The "absolute dominion" rule of the common law, still in force in some American states, treats groundwater as an unowned resource, open to capture by any overlying landowner ( Dellapenna, 201 3). The riparian rights system of the common law views water sources as the common property of all landowners abutting the source ( Getzler, 2004 ). The system of prior appropriation applied in the western United States recognizes private property rights to amounts of flows of water. In Australia ( Davis, 1968 ) and western Canada the Crown owns the water and distributes it to users through a permit system ( Percy, 2005 ). ...

"Diploma" of Frederick Barbarossa granting navigation rights to the monastery of San Carpoforo di Como (1159) I recently came across Acque della Lombardia Medievale,  apparently the catalog for an exhibition held by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano in 2015 . (If you're ever in Milan, don't miss the associated Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.) The editors, Federico Gallo and Rita Pezzola, write: According to Roman law, one defines every permanent water-course as " publicum " whether it was navigable or not, and only rivulets and streams were considered private. During the Middle Ages and in particular in the 10th and 11th centuries, we find more and more imperial and royal diplomas giving grants and donations related to stretches of rovers: they refer to the construction of ports and mills and to fishing and navigating rights. Thus the principle, or better the custom, of considering some parts of a river as capitalized (today we would say "privatized") was...