ABSTRACT
Project into which foreign investment flowed in the 1880s was intended to improve Greek agriculture. The project was the only large-scale agricultural undertaking on the Balkans funded by foreign investors in the nineteenth century. Wine and grapes could be grown on less fertile ground but the other specialist crops required especially rich soils and in some cases irrigated land – just the sort that could be reclaimed from the marshland of Copais. From the start of the modern era, the marshes became subject to more intensive change, producing both winners and losers and increasing social tensions. The investigation of the conflicts that developed in the context of this ‘social appropriation of nature’ is a significant aspect of more recent research on land improvement, also in the only detailed study of Lake Copais by Papadopoulos. In England, a veritable euphoria surrounded land improvement from the 1840s, not least because mass production of the necessary materials sharply reduced the costs.
