Roberta Biasillo, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Mark Stoll, Texas Tech University Manuel González de Molina, Universidad Pablo de Olavide Stefania Barca, University of Coimbra Marco Armiero, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Abstract: In George Perkins Marsh’s conservation classic Man and Nature of 1864, centuries of environmental change in the Mediterranean provided his key evidence. Yet even though the roots of modern capitalism lie in the medieval Mediterranean, economic systems played no part in Marsh’s analysis. Today, a wave of new monographs focuses on the environmental history of capitalism, although none has looked specifically at the Mediterranean as a region. No ESEH panel seems to have directly addressed the capitalism’s impact on the area. This roundtable brings together historians from across the Mediterranean region for a discussion of the historical impact of capitalism on the Mediterranean environment. Each brings expertise in different subfields of environmental history in an effort to bring the Mediterranean out of the historiographical shadows and shine a spotlight on it. The panel considers the subject from a variety of perspectives. How did the rise of merchant capitalism in the medieval Italian maritime republics affect the Mediterranean environment and prepare the ground for plantation and industrial capitalism? What have been the benefits and environmental impacts of the industrialization of Spanish agriculture? What environmental and social costs were paid so that nineteenth-century industrial capitalism could reach into Italian mountain watersheds to slake their growing thirst for energy? How does the Vajont dam disaster (1963, 2000 killed) suggest a historical political ecology of capitalist appropriation of mountains? How did Greece organize its energy sector on anti-capitalist principles? The panel’s goal is to bring these and other questions into dynamic conversation.
