Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 330

This relatively slim, well-written volume contains a rich and compelling case study of contestation over the forest commons of the Cadore region of Italy, part of the Venetian Republic from late medieval times before its absorption into the Napoleonic empire and subsequently Austrian rule. Situated on the upper reaches of the Piave, an extensive trade was conducted downriver into the lowlands – indeed one that brought larger returns and commanded more capital than the more renowned woollen industry of the early modern Venetian state. The book amply demonstrates, along with many other cases now documented, the lack of empirical foundation for the persistent view that struggles over the enclosure of commons generally pitted a traditional subsistence-orientated economy against a commercializing capitalist world underpinned by the central state. Rather, it shows how legal and administrative reforms between 1806 and 1848 helped demarcate new lines of tension and conflict in a long-commercialized world over questions of equity, authority and opportunity. One can doubt that this rich history would have been captured by an approach of hypothesis-testing of any particular institutional or economic theory. It is exemplary agrarian history.

Chapter 1 provides scene-setting of the institutional and economic history of regions to 1811, and the second chapter addresses political, demographic and economic changes in the first half of the nineteenth century. The next two chapters provide a narrative and analysis of the consequences of an institutional revolution. Prior to 1806–07, commons (vicini) were largely governed by assemblies (regoles) of heads of long-standing families, whether in the form of direct (and taxable) ownership as beni comuni; or alternatively as beni comunali which were effectively state property but largely with the usufruct granted to local communities and notables. From this decade, two major transformations occurred. State property was increasingly managed under the auspices of a modern forestry to generate revenue for the state, although local residents continued to provide the labour force. Secondly, enduring French reforms swept away the old assemblies of ancient households to replace them with municipalities, increasingly run by less inclusive councils, whilst a long process of mapping and valuation of the entire land began. By this time Cadore was a highly commercialized region with extensive seasonal labour migration, increasingly dependent on the potato, with local specialization in manufactures and rapid population growth. Around a third of the region was wooded. The timber trade remained very large, with numerous sawmills and one seventeenth of the wider province of Belluno’s population employed directly in the trade.

New forestry supervision brought conflict over cutting practices (between clear-cutting and more traditional selection felling) and a lessening of the powers of allocation once enjoyed by municipalities, which had also largely used timber sales to cover their own liabilities and feather the nest of leading officers. Conflict also arose, as was seen across Europe, with attempts to create a clear delineation and separation of areas for grazing – a notable contribution to these debates being the Lombard official Giuseppe Gautieri’s 300-page work on the pasture of goats! Bonan notes perceptively that despite the expression of generic fears about wood shortage and flood risk, foresters were largely concerned not with deforestation but with the sustainable delivery of forest resources to the market and the state.

More serious violence came however with a law enabling privatization of the commons in 1839, leading to unrest which also found an echo in the revolution of 1848. Bonan deftly shows that these struggles were not a question of being for or against such enclosure, but over who would benefit from the change. The ‘customary’ idea, swept away in the creation of municipalities, that forest resources belonged ancient families, saw a resurgence against fears that rights over the commons would be auctioned off to the highest bidder by municipalities, or that sales would largely benefit municipal officers themselves. This could lead to demands for privatization, but on a principle of division favouring ancient households: simultaneously a reversion to ancient practice and a demand for a radically new system of land ownership over the old commons, a circumstance created unintentionally by the legislation of the central state. Subsequently, widespread unrest in 1848 was not the result of customary resistance to privatization or commerce but was born of the consequences of the unequitable result of those sales of municipal lands, and against the new distribution of power that came with rise of the municipality and in the context of the longstanding high commercial value of timber. This is a moral economy of a kind, clearly influenced by the subtleties of E. P. Thompson’s thinking rather than some of those who have latterly employed the phrase. The book ends noting a continued history of transgression, that ironically came to be interpreted more as a general right of the rural population to access the woods against the strictures of property holders and foresters.

This is a very welcome addition to the history of forests, commons and the rural world, not least as an Italian case study available to an anglophone readership.