Date: 2023
Type: Article
The beautiful public Danube : water uses, water rights, and the Habsburg imperial state in the mid-nineteenth Century
Austrian history yearbook, 2023, Vol. 54, pp. 136-158
GRUFFAT, Corentin Philippe Aurélien, The beautiful public Danube : water uses, water rights, and the Habsburg imperial state in the mid-nineteenth Century, Austrian history yearbook, 2023, Vol. 54, pp. 136-158
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76176
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
This article analyzes an 1869 law from Cisleithania that defined all running waters as public goods. Economic and political actors debated the issue of water rights over several decades in the mid-nineteenth century, as is shown in contemporary publications, proceedings of assemblies, and administrative archives. The legal solution that was ultimately adopted established the management of water rights and uses according to a particular form of property which was intentionally preferred over a system of private appropriation. Looking in detail at what “public good” meant for the actors, this article argues that settling the legal status of rivers served to both consolidate the imperial state's power over society and to make water resources available to a productivist economic system. The new relationships to the environment that emerged during this time were inseparable from contemporary political and economic developments, and legislating was one way to bind these aspects together. Moreover, the case of water rights in the Habsburg Empire adds nuance to binary oppositions between private property and commons that dominate the study of property regimes and environment today. It invites us to consider how the establishment of a productivist economic system rested on a combination of different forms of property and strong state intervention.
Additional information:
Published online: 24 April 2023
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76176
Full-text via DOI: 10.1017/S006723782300017
ISSN: 0067-2378; 1558-5255
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Sponsorship and Funder information:
This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025)
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