Chapter 1 investigates how naval reforms in the late 18th century aimed at rationalizing production, marked by standardizing, centralizing, and concentrating the shipbuilding process in the context of provisioning crisis and market relations. It gives a brief overview of shipbuilding and its transformation in the late eighteenth century, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. It highlights the increasing dependence of the navy on market relations and dynamics in the late eighteenth century, catalyzed by the provisioning crisis emanating from technological transformations, naval competition and military pressures, environmental restrictions, and political-economic challenges, as illustrated by the example of provisioning timber. Against this crisis, naval administrations introduced substantial changes in the production process under the supervision of French naval engineers, whose policies centered on professionalization and the use of “scientific” principles in shipbuilding. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the spatial concentration of capital in the Arsenal, by renewing and expanding its production capacity and exerting centralized control over the production process.

A framing case study describes the Paris Climate Agreement and the worldwide movement to combat climate change. The chapter then discusses international environmental law. The chapter first discusses important concepts from environmental law, its historical evolution, and major principles. It then describes how states have attempted to protect the environment in the realm of the atmosphere, water, and living resources. Finally, the chapter examines how international environmental law interacts with topics discussed earlier in the book, including: trade, investment, human rights, and armed conflict.

How were England’s wetland margins imagined at a new scale, as a site of reform and profit at the heart of a thriving polity? This chapter traces the iterative rewriting of wetlands in histories, geographies, agricultural books, and pro-drainage pamphlets at the turn of the seventeenth century. Driven by desires to unify England and amplify national wealth, these improving authors reconceived the meanings and management of wetlands and common lands. Scholars have often identified this period as a hinge between long-standing beliefs that topography and climate shaped human bodies and societies and a new conviction that soil, water, and air could and should be altered through human intervention. This chapter suggests that environmental determinism and environmental reform were not antithetical impulses but instead two sides of the same coin. Improving authors interlaced older humoral theories with new ideas about political economy to articulate fen futures. In recasting wetlands as unruly, unhealthy, and unproductive, ambitious wetland projects became a ‘cure’ for the nation’s most pressing maladies, promising to produce productive land and industrious subjects.

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.

How were seventeenth-century projects of wetland improvement remembered and revived in the centuries that followed? What remnants of wetlands past persist in popular memory, troublesome spirits, floodwaters, and nature reserves? This chapter traces afterlives of the turbulence and tumult generated by fen projects. In doing so, it weaves together the key strands of this book. First, new intellectual and political tools were needed to define and implement wetland improvement, reconceiving the scale of environmental thought and action in early modern England. Second, customary politics proved a powerful force in the negotiation of improvement as commoners intervened in the flow of water, the exercise of property rights, and the practice of sovereignty. Finally, coercive projects of environmental change expanded cracks in the exercise of central authority, becoming entangled in civil war conflict and imperilling the stability of improvement. It concludes by asking what conflict over early modern wetlands can tell us about the environmental politics of the Anthropocene.

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.

If drainage aimed to free land from the vagaries of floodwater, then enclosure was necessary exclude commoners and transfer management of land to improving landlords and tenants. The development of ‘absolute’ private property in early modern England has often been analysed via legal categories or socio-economic outcomes. Resituating property-making as an environmental act, this chapter argues that the contested exercise of land rights in Hatfield Level relied on the ability to determine how water moved, where cattle could graze, and what kind of plants grew. It traces the words and practices through which commoners and improvers defined their rights, often hinging on disputes about the just distribution of resources. This chapter explores a spectrum of local responses to improvement, including complaints of scarcity, socially fraught adaptation, and action to reinforce customary rights. As disputes over enclosure escalated, physical acts of cultivation and grazing became means by rival groups asserted ‘right’ as jurisdiction and legitimacy. In doing so, they created contrasting environments, generative of different social, economic, and political relations.

From the late sixteenth century, foreign engineers promoted new hydraulic technologies in England. Yet, their techniques were not alone sufficient to implement wetland improvement at a grand scale. Drainage projects generated local controversy almost everywhere they were proposed. Disputes pivoted on thorny questions about who was empowered make decisions about the management of water and land, and by what means. Under the early Stuarts, the crown and its ministers began to act as instigators and facilitators driving forward fen projects. The use of increasingly coercive methods to suppress and circumvent local opposition became entangled in wider constitutional controversies about the limits of royal authority and definitions of the public good. Wetland communities were active participants in debates about the economy and morality, environments and justice, consent and legitimate authority. Customary politics proved a powerful force, unravelling a litany of proposed projects in the early seventeenth century. This impasse was broken when Charles I launched the first state-led drainage project in Hatfield Level in 1626, yoking coercive authority to transnational expertise.

The Sandtoft settlement in Hatfield Level is the best-documented of several refugee communities established on improved wetlands. Described via the resonant language of ‘plantation’, the settlement connects agricultural improvement in England to imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, acting in the service of empire and state while forging transnational Protestant networks. As improvers, the Sandtoft settlers were fastened to the crown’s agenda to produce profit, subdue commoners, and integrate marginal localities into the nation. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, they met with hostility in England: at odds with Archbishop Laud’s repressive efforts to demarcate a distinctively English Protestantism, while facing a violent campaign of expulsion by fen commoners opposing improvement. Interpreting these experiences through the transnational lens of Protestant adversity, the settler community entangled their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia in early modern England, this chapter traces how engineered environmental change forged lines of solidarity and separation.

The epilogue considers one possible future incarnation of the idea of progress in medicine, namely progress as achieving sustainability. Despite the fact that environmental concerns have long been associated with reimagined ideas of progress, aspirations for sustainability remain underdeveloped in medicine. Nevertheless, this epilogue discusses the cases in which the concept of medical progress has been coupled with “sustainable” or “green” medicine. Visions of sustainable medical progress tend to presuppose a multidimensional concept of medical progress, call for expanding the time frame in which progress is assessed, and posit environmental limits as constraints on open-ended progress. At the same time, few of these visions engage with the pluralistic nature of medical progress, preferring to understand measures that support a robust natural environment as intrinsically good for the health of individuals and societies, and broadly aligned with the goals of conventional medicine.