Petrović, Nikola: Hajózás és gazdálkodás a Közép-Duna-Medencében a merkantilizmus korában (Vajdasági Tudományos és Művészeti Akadémia, Novi Sad - Történelmi Intézet, Beograd, 1982)
Summary
renamed the Civil Engineering Authority (Baudirektion), and moved to Buda. Its staff consisted of 33 field engineers and 10 civil servants at the head office. Before this, however, in 1780, the Empress passed the fourth decree on navigation and the field hydraulics service. This legal act was based on earlier, mainly field experience. Its aim was to establish a unified hydraulics service to carry out orders from the head office. Among the eight engineers directly under the head office and responsible for river navigability, the Act mentioned József Kiss, who first conceived the Danube—Tisa canal. I have tried to reconstruct what led up to this decree and show that it was indeed the fruit of experience the field hydraulics engineers had acquired while working on the maintenance of river navigability. In fact, the 1780 decree represented a generalization and systematization of Austrian experience in hydraulics and navigation gathered in the course of the thirty years from 1751 tp 1780. Like the preceeding one, this decree was an expression of the practical needs of the economy, and particularly of transportation. A detailed account and analysis is given of the rights and duties of the field bodies, and of the wide powers and authority given to the field engineers. Item 14 of the decree regulated the relationships between the field engineering service and local authorities, military authorities and owners of the riparian land. However, these legal regulations were not able to prevent frequent clashes between the field hydraulics service and the civil and military authorities and individuals. An orderly water regime has to be based upon the knowledge that rivers are „live", complex organisms, which take savage revenge against half—measures. Hence, though the legal provisions managed to alleviate this contradiction, they could not eliminate it completely. Thereafter, some examples are given of the actual work carried out by the hydraulics service concerning navigation and its improvement. Hydraulics engineers of that time had to deal with a number of important problems, issuing from the fact that there were still no steampowered boats then, and vessels had to be hauled by men, mainly convicts, or at best by animals. Therefore, for upstream navigation, the state of the river banks was no less important than that of the river itself. For maintaining navigability of the rivers it was necessary to have a surveying and mapping service, and a schooling system which could provide the field service with a sufficient number of experts. Some information relating to this problem is also given. These disciplines saw great progress under the Habsburg empire during the 18th century, although foreign engineers, especially Dutch and also French, were still employed in the hydraulics services of the empire. By the end of the century, before attempting the construction of the canal, the monarchy already had a fair number of its own experts. Some of these had been in England, studying her experience in the construction of navigable canals. 484
