Review of Breyfogle & Brown eds., Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History | Jenia Mukherjee 

BOOK REVIEW

Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History

by Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Philip C. Brown (Editors)

Oregon State University Press
2023. x + 249 pp
(paper) ISBN 978-0-87071-237-1

Reviewed by Jenia Mukherjee

What is water? Is it H2O or bottled profit—to be trapped and harnessed as a commodity? The interdisciplinary fields of sociohydrology and hydrosocial research have demonstrated that water-society relations are material, symbolic, relational, and discursive, unfolding place-based specificities across multiple timescales. Hydraulic Societies is a rare and robust compilation focusing on the water history of Central and East Asia where authors have applied and integrated archival, qualitative, and quantitative methods, critically engaged with mainstream perspectives and theories postulated by acclaimed historians and anthropologists, such as Karl Wittfogel and James Scott.

The book is an outcome of deliberations presented at two conferences that took place in May 2016 and June 2017, bringing together scholars who had discussed a wide range of themes in water history across Eurasia, including politics, technologies, extreme events, and socioeconomic bureaucracies, intersecting each other along long-term temporal scales and events. That water scholarship is transboundary, transcultural, transtemporal, and translational is evident through water-power relationship investigations in the chapters offering wide coverage across divergent political regimes: including Tokugawa and postwar Japan, Japanese-controlled Korea, North Korea’s socialist state system, Khanate of Khoqand, tsarist Central Asia, several dynasties of imperial China, and the Japanese colonial regime in Taiwan. To capture geographical and chronological diversities, the chapters demonstrate the significance of deploying more-than-disciplinary approaches in investigating water. Thus, the integration of history, political ecology, and hydrosociality enables the authors in this volume to “reappraise critically the idea of ‘hydraulic societies’ (or ‘hydraulic civilizations’)” proffered by Wittfogel (Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power [1957]) and Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed [1998]) in their immortal works on the role of “modernity” or the modern state in water control and manipulation (p. 4).

Authors in this volume, such as Beatrice Penati, Ya-wen Ku, and Yasuaki Chino, interrogate the archetypal binaries of “precolonial equilibrium” and “colonial hydrology,” shedding light on premodern hydrological interventions and the roles and power within local communities in managing water and food supplies across generations.[1] Countering the fundamental pretext of the “Oriental Despotism” theory of Karl Wittfogel, Scott C. Levi argues that “rather than providing insight into a despotic state structure, the history of water in Khoqand can be used more effectively to identify the limits of the state,” through a comprehensive exploration of the Ferghana Valley between 1709 and 1876 (p. 53). In a similar vein, Penati brings to the fore “the systems of domination within the native society” by mobilizing microhistory based on a sample of 120 villages in Samarkand and through the consultation of vernacular sources, particularly contracts and judicial documents (p. 71).

Another major theme of the volume is colonial-imperial hydraulic engineering and control executed through an “intellectual and technological framework of modern technology and science,” resulting in cement-lined rivers in cities, steel-reinforced dikes and embankments, and large dams (p. 12). But again, Levi, Penati, David Fedman, and Ku demonstrate through their case studies that Central and East Asian territories complicate scenarios through which we should understand “the hydrological patterns of colonial exploitation” (p. 7). The simultaneous catastrophic impacts of hydraulic processes on colonized territories and metropolitan states are fleshed out in the chapters authored by Chino, Shinichiro Nakamura, Fedman, and Ya-wen Ku on colonized Korea, Taiwan, and imperial Japan.

Finally, Nicholas B. Breyfogle and Philip C. Brown offer justification for reflecting on hydraulic societies of East and Central Asia. Apart from providing spatio-cultural diversity and examining rich and deep historical records, the contributions in this volume demystify conventional chronicles of premodern living in harmony with nature. While Ruth Mostern and Ling Zhang unravel humungous efforts of water manipulation in premodern China, Levi’s portrayal of the Khanate of Khoqand and Chino’s description of flood control technologies in premodern Japan validate pre/modern binaries as reductionist and linear. Moreover, the editors rightly argue that there should be a shift in focusing on this particular geography as the harbinger of large dam construction beyond the United States and Europe. Three of the top ten countries that have invested in dams are from Asia. Like Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (2018), this book also demonstrates interconnections among terrestrial, oceanic, and wind patterns in shaping loess or sediment formation affecting riverbeds and leading to extreme events. Mostern’s chapter, “Sediment and State in Imperial China: The Yellow Watershed as an Earth System and a World System,” informs not only the “hydro(sediment)social” paradigm but also “an ecologically informed water history” (p. 139).[2] The investments on water technologies in East and Central Asian territories have had to deal with biophysical challenges in terms of both utilities and riverine overflows.

On a personal note, I feel that this edited volume tacitly offers an ode to Maya Peterson, the environmental/water historian on Central Asia and author of Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (2019) whose life came to an abrupt end in 2021 at the age of forty-one, creating a vacuum in this domain. The historical-geographical coverage of this book with authors using cutting-edge methodological approaches addresses this void to a great extent.

Notes

[1]. Jenia Mukherjee, “From Hydrology to Hydrosociality: Historiography of Waters in India,” in Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability, ed. Jeremy Caradonna (London: Routledge, 2018), 254-72.

[2]. On hydrosociality, see Flore Lafaye de Micheaux, Jenia Mukherjee, and Christian A. Kull, “When Hydrosociality Encounters Sediments: Transformed Lives and Livelihoods in the Lower Basin of the Ganges River,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 4 (2018): 641-63.

(Review author: Jenia Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)

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