The article offers an analysis of the eighteenth-century struggle to control the movement of people and water in Poland and sheds new light upon the colonial nature of the centralized states in Eastern Europe. In doing so, it explores the relationship between three phenomena: first, the Enlightenment discourse on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a kingdom of anarchy, one that lacked real authority over the environment and the population inhabiting it; second, the environmental and biopolitical policies implemented between 1768 and 1793 in Poland, including the regulation of rivers, construction of canals, draining of wetlands, and paving of roads; and finally, the degree to which the Enlightenment state proved unable to control the flows of people and water. In the journalism of this period, most space is taken up by reflections on ways to facilitate movement by water and land by unblocking rivers and paving roads, but the actual policy of the Enlightenment authorities served instead to block movement (by forcing vagrants to work for free, for instance) or to replace unregulated movement with movement controlled by the state.
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