Routledge Whose Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary (Themes in Environmental History)

Whose Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary addresses conflicts surrounding water management, a space where different economic and other socio-political interests meet and sometimes clash. The geographical space that it focuses on is the Kingdom of Hungary, and the time frame is the period from the foundation of the Christian state around the year 1000 to the late medieval period. Modern politics focuses on who has legitimate claims in water-related disputes, but for historians, it is certainly more relevant to understand how such conflicts were approached and resolved in the past. These questions include what kind of disputes unfolded concerning water use; to what degree water was conceived as a private or common good; and how different interests were aligned with each other. Throughout the book’s chapters, it is argued that the use of water by the societies of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages gave rise to complex sets of customs and norms that, until the modern era, were the most important principles for settling water-use disputes. Whose Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental and landscape history, as well as those studying the legal and urban history of premodern Europe.