Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
social and political relationships, in feudal Europe as well as in Muslim world.
16
They were indeed instruments of power for their owners (individuals as well as
abbeys or collectivities) who collected taxes by users: peasants had to use them to
transform cereals into
our to produce bread or beer, to grind olives into oil, etc.
4.3.1 Water and Transportation
For hundreds of years, water has been the best way to ship goods. Political powers,
like Louis XIV in France or the Chinese emperors, took into account the economic
importance of digging canals.
17
Many cities became prosperous because they
functioned as a harbour (either on riversides or on the seaside). Some of them were
places of off-loading, as a resource for the transportation of goods and people. Since
Ancient Times, water has been a crucial factor of economic development and of
employment. Water-related activities shaped the urban space, by creating speci
c
areas: in Imperial Rome, near the Tiber River, the emporium produced a hill (the
“
) just with broken amphorae and terra cotta utensils. When its harbour
silted up, Bruges lost its predominance among Flemish cities at the end of Middle
Ages. Rivers and canals were major transportation arteries until the development of
roads and the railway. In the early Middle Ages, Vikings penetrated into many
kingdoms thanks to their ships, well-
Testaccio
”
tted for shallow rivers.
The shape of many European and North American rivers has changed dramat-
ically over the past two centuries because of the rise of their use for transportation
in the nineteenth century and the construction of roads, houses and factories along
the river banks. In the
rst decades of the Industrial Revolution, canals demon-
strated their importance, such as the Erie Canal, linking New York harbor to the
Great Lakes region: hundreds of kilometers of canals were constructed in France,
the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.
18
In this country, even at the
end of the nineteenth century, waterways were still considered as useful means of
shipping by merchants and businessmen, for instance in the Midwest. After the
increase of railroad shipping prices, they turned to the hope of a new development
of the Mississippi valley, in order to facilitate trade with the southern States and
even with Latin America. The arti
cialization of waterways has often revealed itself
as hazardous, as the
ooding in New Orleans, consecutive to the hurricane Katrina
(2005), dramatically recalled. In 1927, the city had been preserved from a huge
ooding only by dynamiting levees upstream, a decision which led to the spread out
of the Mississippi river over rural areas. If the channelization of many rivers by the
Army Corps of Engineers eased navigation, it also permitted the settlement of more
people near the banks, in former wetlands, and hence increase the human and
16
The tide mill was taken as a symbol by the
rst issue of Water History (Tempelhoff et al.
2009
).
17
Mukerji (
2009
).
18
Jones (
2010
).
