Drainage on the Grand Prairie: the birth of a hydraulic society on the Midwestern frontier
- 作者：Samuel J. Imlay ; Eric D. Carter<sup> ; sup><sup>cartered@grinnell.edusup>
- 关键词：Illinois ; Drainage ; Wetlands ; Agricultural settlement ; Frontier settlement
- 刊名：Journal of Historical Geography
- 出版年：2012
- 期刊代码：94_03057488
- 类别：ear
- 出版时间：April, 2012
- 卷：38
- 期：2
- 页码：109-122
- 文件大小：1212 K
摘要
The Grand Prairie of east central Illinois was notorious for a marshy environment that prevented dense agricultural settlement until late in the nineteenth century. While recent historical-geographical scholarship has focused on innovations in drainage technology, drainage-related laws and institutions, and the ecological impacts of wetland reclamation, it has largely failed to account for the persistence of agrarian structure, and its key component, land tenure, on the Grand Prairie. Late-nineteenth-century reclamation efforts were not quite so transformative as previously believed. The same landed elite that dominated in the pre-drainage era quickly emerged atop a system of public drainage that held the key to the region鈥檚 economic future. In this paper, we extend Karl Wittfogel and Donald Worster鈥檚 theorizations about 鈥榟ydraulic civilizations鈥?from the realm of irrigation to that of drainage. While drainage was indeed important in shaping the history of east central Illinois, we argue that a distinctive social order in east central Illinois emerged from, and was shaped by, an older agrarian structure that had developed in response to marshy, unpredictable conditions before drainage began in the late 1800s. The beneficiaries of the old order did not yield power easily, and instead skillfully capitalized on the new opportunities presented by drainage enterprises, to create a 鈥榟ydraulic society鈥?on the prairie. The new order continued to rely on the exploitation of tenant farmers even as the landscape itself was transformed into the intensely managed and highly productive Corn Belt of today.