Author: Giulio Boccaletti
- Non-Fiction
- Atico de los Libros
- ISBN: 9788418217555
- Release Date: 05-31-2022
Synopsis
Una historia de nuestra relación con la sustancia más elemental de la Tierra... Las primeras civilizaciones de agricultores sedentarios en las riberas de los ríos Nilo, Tigris y Eufrates marcan el punto de partida de este viaje. Boccaletti, investigador de la Universidad de Oxford, recorre la historia social y ambiental del agua, y analiza con claridad cómo la irrigación transformó la estructura social. En Grecia, la propiedad comunal de los pozos sentó las bases de la democracia. En Roma, el sistema hidráulico dio lugar a sistemas de tributación. Por último, el mundo moderno, tal y como lo conocemos hoy día, comenzó con un marco legal para el desarrollo de las infraestructuras del agua. La forma en que nos hemos relacionado con esta sustancia, la más abundante y elemental del planeta, ha determinado nuestra evolución social.
Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boccaletti —honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford— shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization. We see with clarity how irrigation's structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure. Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to —and fundamental reliance on— the most elemental substance on earth.
