Contested Water. The Management of Natural Resources and the Emergence of Sustainability Problems in Northern Italy During the Early Modern Period

In this essay I present the main objectives and the first provisional results of a project on the management of natural resources and the emergence of sustainability problems in the low plain of early modern Lombardy, northern Italy. More precisely, I focus on some social institutions and large landowners in the low plains close to Milan and Brescia. I show how it is possible to explore sustainability in the past through the study and analysis of records of conflicts over the use of environmental resources, and also how this phenomenon must be analysed and interpreted in a holistic way, from multiple perspectives. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .