Leonard Blussé

University of Leiden

Since circa 1300 the Rhine and Yangzi deltas have continually belonged to the world's most developed and richest key economic regions. Global history is full of saga's of rise and decline of river civilizations but what sets these two river systems apart is their remarkable continuous and even to some extent parallel development since medieval time. This explorative talk is inspired by insights from recent historical ecological studies on man and the environment by for example, David Blackbourne, Auke van der Woud, Ken Pommeranz, William Skinner and John R. McNeill. In the river landscapes of Western Europe's Rhine River and its tributaries and the Yangzi watershed of eastern China, networks of river systems have exercised an extraordinary influence on the development of regional economies and key economic areas in pre-industrial and industrial times. The question is: was this mere accident or is there something to learn from this? Why the Yangzi and Rhine, and why not for instance the Danube, the Ganges, the Yellow River or for that matter the Mississippi, all of them rivers with a rich historical past? This talk aims to approach diachronically the evolution of clusters of towns in the Rhine and Yangzi watersheds as they grew from centres of local and regional economies to integral parts of the global economy. Using the comparative method some similarities, parallels and differences in these particular cultural historical landscapes that grew out of the dynamic dialectical relationship between man and the riverscape.