Waters and Welfare: Rivers, Infrastructure, and the Territorial Imagination in Grand Ducal Tuscany, 1549–1609

Over the central decades of the sixteenth century, the Tuscan ducal state formed in the midst of a flood crisis. A cooling climate, excessive rainfall, and deforestation, among other meteorological and anthropogenic changes now associated with the Little Ice Age, caused rivers and streams to more frequently and violently brim over and lay waste to urban and rural property. Under dukes Cosimo I de’ Medici and his sons Francesco I and Ferdinando I, the Tuscan government founded specialized offices and appointed staffs of technicians and bureaucrats to rectify this disorderly aquatic topography. Studying the administrative and cartographic records they produced, in concert with environmental legislation, utopian development proposals, and manuscript and print treatises on architecture, engineering, and political economy, this dissertation explores the arduous practical and intellectual work of alluvial planning on the novel scale of the territorial state in the decades before alluvial hydraulics coalesced as a branch of the physical sciences. Moving from the muddy labors of architects and engineers dispatched to mitigate flooding and project alluvial laws across ducal dominions, to the grandiose ideations of a new class of technocrats who proposed ambitious schemes for transforming intractable waterways into useful systems of commercial infrastructure, this dissertation argues that the problems of water elicited novel ways of imagining territory as a design problem. For the arrayed actors engaged in ordering this space, absolutist forms of planning emerged in the sixteenth century as attractive solutions for grappling with environmental crisis and securing state welfare in an increasingly interconnected and competitive world. Beyond revealing the much earlier legacies of improvement ideologies and projects for infrastructurally-enabled capitalist circulation most often associated with Enlightenment Europe and global modernity, this research demonstrates that early political economy, as it developed in Renaissance Italy, was conceived as a fundamentally architectural enterprise. Challenging a prevailing tendency to view early modern territorial states as abstract or conceptual entities—relations of sovereignty, bundles of laws and rights crystallizing in bounded, Euclidean space—this research shows how in the crucible of the sixteenth century, states were also conceived as material creations to be physically sculpted at scale.

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