Call for Papers on the history of the relationship between landscape change, knowledge production and politics, 1850-1945

 

The goal of our research group is to study local forms of interaction between human activities and natural processes that had a bearing on nation-building and empire-building within Austria-Hungary and in the Balkans between 1850 and 1945. Besides economic purposes, knowledge production about natural phenomena and anthropogenic landscape change or other interventions served political goals, too. Under the banner of welfare or economic policies states conquered areas of life that had been out of their sight before. These efforts do not only provide information about the methods and extent of expanding state power but also about how people at various local, regional and state level contexts thought about environment and about nature-culture interaction.

We are, therefore, interested in how considerations about landscapes shifted in various settings and how these interacted with each other and with actual landscape change. Links between positions and perspectives are in the focal point of our enquiry. As it is customary in historical research, we need to work with scattered source material. Thus, one of our objectives is to identify proxy questions along which scaling is possible. One such possibility is that we study the process of commodification, in other words, we trace the way the relationship between materials and living beings seen as resources, activities resulting in landscape change and social inequalities intertwine. Production and trading of goods at various levels is one of the fundamental links between scales that may be grasped in both material and spatial terms. Commodification does not only produce horizontal linkages. Producers serving central areas looked for cheap resources, and by doing so constituted or strengthened the peripheral position of other areas. In the case of resources that were state monopolies and in state-owned areas central bureaucracy also became a factor in the equation. Thus, centre-periphery relations, value chains and social inequalities played a role in landscape change. The study of these may especially be relevant in the case of ethnic or imperial borderlands.

It is well-known from nationalism studies that collecting economic data and the statistical representation of these were important areas of state activity in the second half of the 19th century. Surveys, often preceded steps to be taken for modifying local realities including land-use rights. Expectations and resistance to such plans impacted the process of surveys and their outcome. This set of problems constitute the second major theme of the volume we are editing.

Natural disasters may also be examples when dramatic changes in the landscape result in linkage between centre and countryside or among territories that belong to different states.  At times, large scale operations directed from the centre followed disasters: engineering and scientific exploration and design and efforts to set up a network of stations that take measurements that enable operators to predict similar events. If we look beyond the language that sounds certainty and factuality, we often find that there are unexpected difficulties that defy calculations done previously. We ask how efforts to make changes related to local knowledge and what was the underlying perception of nature and the human scope to change natural processes.

In summary, the main themes of the planned volume are:

The relationship among local, regional and global perspectives in the course of anthropogenic landscape change (resources, living beings, social inequality, centre- periphery relations)

Knowledge production about the economic value of the empire and about certain (peripheral) areas

Natural disasters and related action including knowledge production

We primarily expect studies between 5000 and 7000 word-long that take one of the approaches outlined above. However, we are also interested to hear about other solutions that explain the relationship between knowledge, politics and landscape between 1850 and 1945.

In the first phase, please send us a cc. 500-word-long abstract that included a short description of the set of notions you wish to operate and the sources that may be used to present these until the end of February 2021. We will notify all those that submit their proposal. The deadline for sending us your fully developed papers will be 30 June 2021. Please, send your abstracts to  the following email IDs: Eszik.Veronika@btk.mta.hu  and Demeter.Gabor@btk.mta.hu

[image: Viennese city dwellers get rescued after massive floodings in 1847, from http://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/disaster-ahead-how-danube-floods-created-telegraph-networks]