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carrying out drainage work was “the lack of recognition among the population about the benefits and

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profitability of melioracja.”

Propaganda efforts to persuade peasants to participate in modernizing schemes offered one

option for state officials. In order to counter the alleged reluctance of locals to get on board with land

drainage schemes, the engineer who ventured out into the marshlands of Kostopol county in 1928

proposed that the authorities organize informative lectures and tours to those areas that had already

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been drained. But what was the state to do if people were not persuaded by words and excursions
alone? What if peasants simply did not know what was “good” for them? Was it acceptable, they

asked, for the state to force people to participate in rural modernizing projects of which they would

allegedly be the ultimate beneficiaries?

The latter question tended to be answered in the affirmative by representatives of both non-

democratic states that sought to civilize underdeveloped regions at home and supposedly liberal

Western nation-states in their far-flung colonies abroad. From Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Soviet

Union, and Hitler’s Germany to British and French colonies in Africa, elites framed projects to

control land, waterways, and forests as part of a broader mission to combat indigenous

backwardness, and they often attempted to mobilize huge swaths of their own citizens (or subjects) in

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the process. As Caroline Ford put it, “colonial states frequently blamed environmental problems on
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indigenous practices and on irresponsible indigenous stewardship with respect to the land.” But if

the Sanacja government in Poland had neither the utopian ideological dreams nor the state capacity to

carry out environmental schemes on a mass scale, its officials still emphasized the important role that

38 Letter to the department of the regional assembly in Kostopol county (April 28, 1928), DARO 26/1/57/27.
39 Ibid., 27od.
40 Mussolini’s project to drain the Pontine marshes south of Rome in the early 1930s, and to thereby both remove the
mosquito that spread malaria and create spaces for internal colonization, was a “titanic enterprise” of “totalitarian
land transformation.” See Frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962 (New Haven, 2006), 149. On
Germany, see David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
(London, 2006). On the French empire, see Caroline Ford, “Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the
Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (2008): 341-362.
41 Caroline Ford, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 8.

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