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Introduction: Water History is World History.

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Introduction: Water history is world history ix

Introduction: Water History is World History

Terje Tvedt & Eva Jakobsson

More than 2,000 years ago Pausanias, the Greek geographer who
travelled throughout the ancient world, declared that no city had the
right to call itself a city unless it had at its centre an ornamental
fountain. Fountains illustrated then – as they have done throughout
the ages – an ideological and cultural notion of the triumph of
civilization over nature: water, the giver and taker of life, in the
fountain appears at the control of human beings. The fountain also
symbolizes a more mundane and direct material fact – no city and
no country has been able to exist or develop without subjugating
water in one form or another to the demands of human society. This
universal natural and social fact alone makes water history relevant
world history.
The struggle to control water is a struggle without end. Most
people do not reflect on the historical significance of the subter-
ranean labyrinth honeycombing the ground beneath the modern
urban architecture; or how every time someone turns on a tap, there
is a gurgle of water somewhere, deep below the houses and streets,
made possible by the work of water planners and engineers over
generations. To bring water to an urban population is a ceaseless
endeavour that has been, and continues to be, fought in cities
worldwide, from Mohenjo-daro, a centre of the Indus Valley
civilization that flourished around 2,500 BC, crisscrossed by streets
with covered drains, to the enormous pipe-systems necessary to
serve the water needs of the present mega-cities. Mankind’s
continuing relation to water explains why Sextus Julius Frontinus
(AD 40–103), who was responsible for providing ancient Rome with
the fresh water it needed, can be so easily understood today, when
he complained, almost 2,000 years ago, at the fame afforded to the
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x A History of Water

beautiful but useless Egyptian pyramids and Greek temples, while

the absolutely essential water structures of Rome were disregarded.
The Pantheon and the Coliseum may have brought Rome fame but
the city owed its existence to the water running beneath it.
Impressive aqueducts, both above ground and underground,
transported water from outside the city to its very centre, and made
Rome possible. The multiple uses and the steadily increasing
demand for water – water for transport, for electricity and energy,
for chemistry and industrial production, for leisure and ornament,
for health and cleaning – make water planning an aspect of
development itself.
A history of water control should, therefore, consider the three
types of temporality that the French historian Fernand Braudel
(1902–85) employed. The first of these – the événementielle –
involving short-lived dramatic ‘events’, should focus on the
implementation of large water projects, entrepreneurial engineers,
sudden floods or droughts. Conjoncures, Braudel’s term for cyclical
processes that might last up to half a century, still slow but with
perceptible rhythms, could include, for example, planning
traditions, dominant scientific notions and a level of available
technological solutions, etc. Finally, water history definitely must
also deal with what Braudel called ‘la longue durée’: historical waves
of great length – perhaps the most fascinating of the three
temporalities for the water historian.1 This type of temporality can be
regarded as a kind of ‘geographical time’, focusing on relationships
between humans and the environment, that change almost
imperceptibly; being a history of repetition and recurring cycles
based on seasons or longer natural cycles affecting the cycle of the
seasons themselves: such as climate changes, rivers finding new
courses, etc. It entails a focus on those aspects of everyday life that
might remain relatively unchanged for centuries.
But just as important: water history will have to cut across these
temporalities, and move freely from one to the other. Water history
will have to liberate itself from the sense of material necessity that
often is associated with Braudel’s notions, simply because dramatic
(water) events may change what constitutes the structure of la
longue durée: a new dam upstream will fundamentally alter the lives
of people downstream – ‘for ever’, and thus in a single event
remove what constitutes the regularity and predictability of everyday
life. Dramatic events in water flow or water control may not,
however, coincide with similar events in the broader economic,
cultural or political context. Expressed in a non-Braudelian way:
when it comes to water, events may not only be of a passing
importance but may also have a long-term, irreversible impact.
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Introduction: Water history is world history xi

The history of water control is extremely varied in its technical

complexity, its political and economic intentions, and its ecological
and social impacts. Some water projects represent truly dramatic
changes in history, e.g., the Hoover dam in the USA, the Aswan dam
in Egypt and the Sudan, the Duke of Bridgewater canal in England
or the Emperor canal in China. When implemented they changed
the course of development in the locality and beyond. But mostly
water control is an ordinary, everyday matter – repairing a ditch here
and turning a tap there – practices repeated year after year and day
after day, and thus re-enacting and confirming existing relationships
to water.
All societies have in one way or another been forced to manage
their water resources, and have been affected by how the waters run
through their landscape and how they have adapted to it and
controlled it. Consequently, the issue of water control brings into
focus all the seminal questions of historical interpretation: the origin
of food production, the establishment of the first cities, the riverain
irrigation civilizations of the Middle East and Asia, and water as the
main force of power during thousands of years, including the first
phase of the industrial revolution.
Since water control is as old as human society, and water is a
universal societal resource, water in itself – and societies’ relations
to it – are empirically fascinating and theoretically challenging. From
time immemorial, man has tried to master nature by transforming
and controlling the water running through the landscape. This
volume illustrates how these efforts have dealt with flood control
and disease control, dams and canals for irrigation, rivers for
navigation, and the different ways of using water as a source of
power. Dams have stored, regulated, and raised water. Watersheds
have been reworked and linked. Rivers have been forced between
levees and dykes, canalized, straightened and cemented. Water has
been diverted from areas of water surplus to areas of water deficit.
Lakes have been lowered and wetlands drained and the artificial
river is definitely not a modern invention.2

THE FUTURE OF FRESH WATER IS THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

The continuing occurrence of vast floods, devastating droughts, and

their aftermath, shows that despite 5,000 years of effort, humanity
has yet to succeed totally in its attempts to control water. Some of
the most impressive achievements in history have undoubtedly been
linked to water control but to subjugate the ever-changing waters to
the needs of mankind remains a daunting challenge, more so in
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xii A History of Water

some regions than in others. The prospect of climate change will

make water control an even more pressing issue across the world,
since the solutions of the past may not work in the future. Global,
regional and local changes in precipitation patterns and uncertainty
about future climatic conditions will force societies to adapt to a
new water reality, and they will undergo deep structural changes
due to the combined impact of historical processes and the
fundamental social importance and physical character of water. If
the climate does change and, for example, glaciers in Himalaya, in
the Alps or on Kilimanjaro are seriously diminished in size – as
many scientists warn – societies may have to reorganize on a large
scale in order to adapt to increasing water variability. The
importance of the water landscape to all societies means that such
uncertainty will demand changes to water infrastructure and water
policies. The essential and structural role that water plays in society,
even though at the same time it is fundamentally structured by
society, implies that significant, and in some cases even minor,
changes in the water landscape and in the water control system,
may have profound impacts both on nature and on society. With
water, the past definitely reveals itself in the future, and the future
is embedded in the past.
In spite of the many efforts at water management around the
globe, it is evident that many countries will face water shortages in
the years to come. Governments and peoples will have to make
tough choices to quell the thirst for water and to avoid water wars.
In some water-rich countries, on the other hand, they have started
to prepare for the end of the fossil fuels era. They argue that we are
heading for the hydro-age, where water will replace oil and gas and
thus solve both the energy crisis and the pollution problem. (The
Altinget in Iceland, has decided that their country shall enter the
hydro-age, and that everything on their island, from cars to factories,
shall be driven by water.) But one trend seems to be shared by both
water-poor and water-rich countries: the privatization drive in the
water sector – one of the most fundamental transformative effects of
the New Development Paradigm, and a redefinition of the relation-
ship between state and society.
Future water control also includes dealing with water-borne
disease, whether it be from bilharzia in Egypt or the West Nile virus
in the United States. Already 2 billion people are reported by the
United Nations to be without safe drinking water. Changes in
temperature and rainfall will spread water-borne disease – and
polluted and infected water will continue to haunt humanity in the
decades ahead. Human interference has turned sacred rivers, such
as the Bagmati in Nepal, into arteries of death and pollution. As they
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Introduction: Water history is world history xiii

gather to worship, millions upon millions of believers will come to

realize that central religious rituals and practices connected to holy
water are at stake.
The era of large-scale water control projects is not over, as many
observers seem to believe and as many environmentalists hope. For
China’s leaders, for example, desperate water situations have made
them resort to massive projects. The growing water scarcity of the
North China plains and the sinking groundwater table that threatens
the very existence of Beijing as a capital, have led them to revive a
gigantic plan, first suggested by Mao Zedong in 1952. The project
will take 5 per cent of the Yangtze’s flow and pump it hundreds of
kilometres to the water-thirsty cities and farmland of the north – as
far as Inner Mongolia. Those who support the project say that it is
better to relocate hundreds of thousands of people now, rather than
face the prospect of having to move whole industrial cities and
millions of people later.
In 2002 construction started on the eastern route, partly using the
1,800 kilometre canal built during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368)
from the south-eastern city of Hangzhou to Beijing. In the coming
years more than US$12 billion will be invested in the construction
of the east and middle water-diversion routes, stretching for 2,400
kilometres. But even if this gigantic project succeeds, the national
water crisis will not be solved: reducing China’s water crisis will
require an across-the-board effort to restructure all sectors of China’s
economy with water-efficiency as a priority – including raising the
price of water to encourage efficient use, strengthening pollution
controls to protect scarce water supplies, implementing water-saving
measures and water harvesting on a large scale. The water shortage
will become, and remain, a serious bottleneck both in the country’s
economy, and in securing a stable relationship between the state
and the people. China’s leaders are realizing that the most serious
threat to their rule may not be a desire for Western-style democracy
but a growing thirst for water.
On the African continent, in one of the most forbidding stretches
of desert in the world – in Libya – another epic battle in the quest for
more water continues. Beneath the baked crust of earth here,
phenomenal supplies of water have been discovered. The Libyans
drilled not only for oil but for water. They found a hidden
underground pool the size of Germany, several hundred metres deep!
The goal became to bring this water from the south-east and the
south-west of the country to the shores of the Mediterranean, where
most inhabitants of Libya live. The project is aptly called the Great
Man Made River Project. One of the world’s largest single construction
projects is being implemented. Enormous pipelines will eventually
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xiv A History of Water

transport two million cubic metres of water a day, twice the flow of
the River Thames in England. The network will extend about 3,380
kilometres. In the 1980s the Libyan leader, Colonel Ghadaffi,
launched the Great Man Made River Project, nicknamed the 8th
Wonder of the World. To create a river as long as the Rhine out of a
finite resource must be one of the most striking examples of man
taking control over water. But to tap these enormous aquifers is to tap
the liquid legacy of a past climate. About 10,000 years ago the barren
Sahara was a green savannah, where giraffes and elephants roamed.
Heavy rains filled lakes and rivers and gradually formed groundwater
basins. It is this old water that now will be consumed through the use
of modern technology The conquest of parts of the Sahara can be
seen as an ultimate example of what is possible with new technology
using water as a powerful tool.
The leaders of China and Libya are exploiting modern water
transfer technology to its maximum. In countries with stronger
democratic traditions and more environmental movements, such
solutions stir social conflict, as can be seen in Spain over the project
to divert waters from Ebro into the dry areas to the south of the
country. But notwithstanding this, the age of the major water project
is not over.
Mankind’s ambitions in water control have never been greater
than they are at present. Worldwide there are 45,000 dams greater
than 15 metres in height, and 400,000 square kilometres are flooded
by dammed water. Some 80 per cent of the Northern Hemisphere
discharge is moderately or heavily regulated.3 So much has already
been done that, if at some future date archaeologists from another
planet search through the remnants of this civilization, they may
well conclude that the true temples of humanity were the large-scale
water works. This ‘assault’ on the rivers has meant that water
systems all over the world have lost their natural seasonal and
annual rhythm: some of them operate on ‘factory time’, while others
are subjected to the rhythm of irrigated agriculture or even tourism.
The global development in the twentieth century represents one of
the most fundamental changes in the relationship between water
and society ever, whose implications we do not yet properly
understand. Therefore, many of the essays in this book deal with
topics from this last century when the relationship between human
societies and their water environment changed radically.

THE ‘TRADITION’ AND WATER HISTORY

In order to improve our understanding of the role of water in history

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Introduction: Water history is world history xv

and development it is necessary to break away from dominant

traditions within the social sciences. Nature, or the nature of water,
has often been overlooked or discarded as a topic of research
relevance; or to be more precise, it is a topic which the mainstream
social sciences seem to have had difficulties in understanding and
dealing with, unless it has been reduced to or treated as a social issue.
The dominant tradition can be traced to the ‘father of sociology’
and one of the most influential thinkers in the establishment of
social science: Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). He underlined very
clearly what the task of the social scientist should be: ‘a social fact’
could and should be explained by another social fact. Only based
on this dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ could sociology as
a distinct, autonomous discipline develop.4 It was social facts, and
definitely not the river as physical nature or as an historical agent of
its own, that should be the object of study for social scientists:

These ways of thinking should not be confused with biological

phenomena, since they consist of representations and of actions; nor
with psychological phenomena, which exist only in the individual
consciousness and through it. They constitute, thus, a new variety of
phenomena; and it is to them exclusively that the term ‘social’ ought
to be applied.5

This conceptualization of the nature/society divide and the

subsequent delineation of the research object of social scientists was
strengthened by highly influential theories of history and modernity
of the last two hundred years: historical development has been
regarded as a process by which mankind is liberated from nature or
from the powers of nature. Nature has also been understood as the
opposite to freedom, and human domination of it as a criterion of
development and a step in the process of liberation. The separation
of nature from society was one prerequisite for regarding nature
instrumentally, as a set of passive objects to be exploited. Typical of
this tradition is Karl Marx’s statement: ‘Capitalism liberated man from
the traditional, localised dependency of nature, and with it the
“nature idolatry” this relationship was associated with. It was no
longer “nature” that fettered the human being; it was capitalism that
did that.’ In Grundrisse he wrote:

For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind,
purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself,
and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely
as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an
object of consumption or as a means of production.6
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xvi A History of Water

Similar notions are also reflected in different modernization

theories, from those suggested by British thinkers and philosophers
in the early nineteenth century to the post-Second World War
theories of a universal development process in stages as promoted
by the United Nations, rendering largely irrelevant and potentially
damaging, studies entailing how particular water landscapes have
affected societies and their development patterns and options
differently. The water landscapes of Jordan and Norway, China and
England, or India and Mali, have obviously in fundamental ways
impacted these countries’ development processes, so much so that
development theories with universal ambitions can be seriously
questioned.
Given the dominant evolutionary schemata for historical
development it is unsurprising that interest in how societies have
been influenced by nature has been relegated to the background.
One anomaly in Marx’s historical materialistic theory of history, the
notion of ‘the Asiatic mode of production’, was heavily influenced
by rather mechanistic ideas of how waterscapes can affect societal
formations over long periods of time. Perhaps because of the place
it gave nature in explaining social forms it remained an anomaly,
and nature/society relations, typically for his time, did not enter into
his broader conceptual framework. This perspective has encouraged
a rather sterile, narrowly defined discussion about whether the
subject (human agent) or object (society or social institutions)
should be regarded as having primacy, while the object of nature is
left out.7 The conventional consensus perspective has generally
been that theoretical and empirical analyses can be been based on
the assumption that societies are persistent, cohesive, stable,
generally integrated wholes, differentiated by their cultural and
social-structural arrangements.8 In this framework it becomes
relatively irrelevant to study relations between physical structures
and social organization.
Similarly, in an influential book by the sociologist, Anthony
Giddens, sociology is defined as ‘the study of human social life,
groups and societies’,9 and the aim is to understand the ‘subtle, yet
complex and profound, ways in which our lives reflect the contexts
of our social experience . . . Sociology focuses in particular upon
social life in the modern world – the world brought into being by
the sweeping changes in human societies which have occurred over
the past two centuries or so.’10
Modernity is summarized by explicitly relegating nature, and
consequently the water landscape, to a place outside his picture of
what is to be explained:
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Introduction: Water history is world history xvii

Conditions of life for previous generations were always insecure:

people were at the mercy of natural disasters, plagues and famines.
In the industrialized countries today we are largely immune from
these insecurities; our uncertainties about the future derive from the
social forces we ourselves have unleashed.11

Structures are not, and cannot, in this way of reasoning, be linked

to nature or waterscapes, but are the semantic and normative rules
and power resources that, as abstract properties of communities, are
used by social actors to produce the skilled performances which
constitute social life. Through their use in social practice, structures
are reproduced as features of social communities, so that structures
(as reproduced practices) are the outcome of practical activity. It is
these rules and resources enabling and constraining action that are
themselves constituted by action. This structuration theory is
concerned with ‘recurrent social practices and their transforma-
tions’12 Giddens also argues that ‘human agency is bounded, human
beings produce society but they do so as historically located actors,
and not under conditions of their own choosing’.13 Structurated
systems – and action there – do not really exist in time and space
but bind time and space.
The constructivist post-modern tradition is an extreme variant of
this view: nature itself has had no influence on the development of
natural science. The epistemological status or the ‘real existence’ of
the phenomena being studied is of no interest. Whether one
explanation is better than the other is irrelevant, since nature is
socially constructed anyway, and science is no more factual than
non-science.14 Constructionists are obscuring the difference between
‘constituting reality’ and ‘constituting our accounts of reality’ and
between controlling nature and excluding nature. The construc-
tionists have constructed the theory of nature as social construction,
arguing that such constructions reflect vested interests and
contingencies that the actors themselves do not necessarily
understand. The dynamism of water (or nature in general) is
consequently brought and concealed under the cover of social
action, and the reality of water, of river hydrology, of precipitation
patterns, does not in reality exist.
On the opposite side one can find Karl Wittfogel, a German-born
social scientist who was strongly influenced by the debate on
Marxism in Germany in the 1920s.15 He argued that the origins of
despotic government are to be found in the great river valleys and
caused by the implementation of large-scale irrigation works; and
that this created what can be called a distinctive Asiatic mode of
production, a developmental stage that appeared, but was not, as
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xviii A History of Water

indicated above, developed in Marx’s writing. In the 1920s different

positions developed between a kind of determinist Marxist
geopolitics and an anthropocentric version of Marxism that denied
nature any sort of independent status. Wittfogel aimed at developing
a theory of history that gave nature a central place within a broad
framework of development-orientated, historical materialism. Thirty
years later he published Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of
Total Power (1957). Here he developed a somewhat reductionist and
radical mechanical theory that not only ascribes the water landscape
a role in historical development but also gives it a decisive role in
determining social institutions and even political forms of authority.
He talked about ‘hydraulic government’,16 and ‘hydraulic
agriculture’.17 Water control on a large scale made the state much
stronger than society, and that ‘prevents the nongovernmental forces
of society from crystallizing into independent bodies strong enough
to counterbalance and control the political machine’.18
Wittfogel aroused much criticism, including accusations of loose-
ness of terminology and definition, and the establishment of
hypotheses incapable of falsification. It has been argued that China
has no concrete landscape and no concrete historical period that can
be pointed to as a credible illustration of anything approaching the
pure type and mechanism of ‘oriental despotism’,19 and that
irrigation is far too broad a rubric to have precise heuristic value.
Wittfogel defended his position by arguing that economic and
political institutions, like all others, develop on definite geographical
foundations, and that they function within a specific territorial
framework; they grow and change within a physical environment
whose influence is determined by the society’s historical level,
structure and trends. It is possible to argue that what Wittfogel has
done is to state a rather sophisticated probabilistic or challenge-and-
response position: historical conditions being equal, a major natural
difference may be the possible cause of decisive institutional
difference. The objective structure of a particular water landscape
may determine not only the productive activity but also its direction
by providing both raw materials and a market outlet, and often more
importantly, natural forces of production. The water environment
can create conditions for a definite but multilinear social develop-
ment process.
Historians and other social scientists have long been reluctant to
analyse relationships between water landscapes and social
organization. But perhaps the most important criticism of Wittfogel,
and in line with the emphasis this volume gives to specific hydro-
logical conditions, is the fact that he failed to explore all the different
and varying physical and hydrological aspects of the rivers and
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Introduction: Water history is world history xix

water systems which his historical actors related to. His geographical
archetype was drawn from the big rivers of Asia, but this ‘river’ did
not resemble the water systems of Sri Lanka, of Iraq and perhaps not
even of Egypt, and indeed not many of the water bodies explored
in this book.

WATER NARRATIVES

During the 1990s historians, influenced by environmental concern

and development pessimism, wrote stories about what might be
called ‘Histories of the Dead River’, i.e. stories about how humans
negatively affected the vulnerable waterscape. Typical titles were: A
River No More: the Colorado River and the West (Fradkin, 1984) or A
River Lost: the Life and Death of the Columbia (Harden, 1996), or
River of Sorrow: Environment and Social Control in Riparian North
India 1770–1994 (Hill, 1997).20 A different perspective emphasized
harnessed rivers as ‘The Conquered River’ and was concerned with
how control of rivers also meant social domination of some people
over others – see, for instance, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and
the Growth of the American West (Worster, 1985). Worster wrote:

Here, then, is the true West, which we see reflected in the waters of
the modern irrigation ditch. It is, first and most basically, a culture and
society built on, and absolutely dependent on, a sharply alienating,
intensely managerial relationship with nature. [ . . . ] Quite simply, the
modern canal, unlike a river is not an ecosystem. It is simplified,
abstracted Water, rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed
to raise food, fill pipes, and make money.21

In environmental history during the 1990s, the discussions were

concerned with dissolving the dichotomy of culture and nature. The
most important of the works taking a post-modern approach to the
harnessed river is perhaps Richard White’s, The Organic Machine:
the Remaking of the Columbia River.22 White’s arguments can be
compared with Blaine Harden’s A River Lost: the Life and Death of
the Columbia, published a year later, analysing the same river and
the same history but interpreting it in a very different way. Harden’s
narration of the Columbia is a history of destruction: ‘It has been
raised, fattened, and slowed.’ The Dead River is reduced to pure
technology: ‘The river was killed more than sixty years ago and was
reborn as plumbing.’ It has been transformed to an ‘electricity-
irrigation-transportation machine’. To Harden nothing is to be found
in the Columbia that is not man-made: ‘There are no rapids at all,
2801 History of Water Vol1 2/11/05 12:26 pm Page xx

xx A History of Water

nor are there waterfalls, riffles, eddies, sinkholes, or a single

“agitated gut”: The Columbia does not flow, it is operated.’ Richard
White, on the other hand, states that nature is simultaneously a
cultural construction and something outside man. Nature is the
spawning salmon as well as man catching the salmon. White argues
that by stressing that canals and dams are part of the river one can
maintain that there is no border between man and nature. The river
is just a flow of energy. Even in its highest stages of development
the river ‘remained a natural system with a logic of its own’ – a logic
not controllable by man. White defines the Columbia as an organic
machine; though altered by man it retains its natural qualities. Water
within this perspective tends to become passive and inanimate,
understood as something which exists only as far as humans
conceive it to exist. Other studies combined an interest in both how
rivers have been conceptualized and become subject of a particular
river discourse, and how rivers as actors in their own right affect
societies and economies.23 The chapters of this book share an
understanding that fresh water is both an actor in its own right and
that at the same time it is impossible to access this reality except
through cultural and social lenses.
Control of water is, and always has been, based on cultural
constructions of water, whilst at the same time it carries in itself
values or ideologies. Dams, the classical symbols of water control,
and as such also the symbols for different types of political capital
and moral authority, have ideological connotations and signify
particular development policies. However, large-scale water projects
have also ended up as symbols of failure, in ancient times as well
as in ours. It is important to study both the unnatural and natural
history of water disasters, since not only will floods vary and have
different causes and consequences but fundamental concepts like
flood, drought, water shortage and water conflicts have different
meanings and connotations in different physical and social settings.
The Chinese have an age-old saying that nicely sums up the long
but unending story of man-water relations: ‘Man always aspires
higher but water flows to the lowest point.’

NARCISSUS REVISITED

This volume aims to encourage research into water history. This

history is not only rich in itself but also makes it possible to throw new
light on a number of important historical questions, from the first river
civilizations to the present day, whether one investigates this complex
and fascinating history as unfolded in the slow rhythm of la longue
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Introduction: Water history is world history xxi

durée or in the abrupt changes caused by catastrophic events. As the

research field develops it will be a source of wisdom for the
understanding of historical developments at large. Faced with the
future water situation, there is, especially, one important lesson that
can be learnt from this volume: there are no quick fixes to the water
problem. That is one reason why this volume presents a number of
narratives from a wide range of water situations: to emphasize the
need for the historical, concrete, empirical knowledge that water
management must be based on if it is to improve, and be able to meet
the challenges facing societies in the future.
Some 2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (540–480
BC) said that one could never step into the same river twice.
Heraclitus’s ideas are also summed up in the famous words,
‘Everything is in motion’, or ‘All is in flux’. What he meant by these
sayings was that, although it is tempting to identify a river in terms of
its water, it is hardly advisable. If one does, then one has to accept the
consequence: that the river which a year ago (or even yesterday for
that matter), one called the Thames or the Nile, simply does not exist
any longer. Or rather, it is now mingled with the waters of the North
Sea or the Mediterranean. It has therefore become something other
than it was. The river that one can see or step into one year, or today,
transforms itself into something partially or wholly new, simply
because, depending on the rate of flow and the river’s length, the
water has been wholly or partially replaced by other water. Hence the
river cannot be equated with its water. Heraclitus believed that the
river needs to be conceptualized in another way. It is impossible to
touch the river. One can only touch the river’s water. The river
therefore has permanence as a process, but not as some specific
substance or substantial object. Similarly, the rain that falls on the
various societies of the earth is constantly being changed and is never
the same. This volume presents a number of essays which, taken
together, demonstrate that the movement of water in the landscape
and in society is not just enduring but is an ‘eternal’ phenomenon
which has constantly created and re-created certain and very varying
possibilities for social organization and has constantly been
influenced by human action.
The chapters on the importance of water and water control in this
volume can be seen in the light of a re-interpretation of the Greek
myth of Narcissus. The gods punished Narcissus by making him fall
in love with his own reflection. On looking into the water he saw his
own face looking back at him; he saw only his reflection. In other
words, he did not notice the water that made his reflection possible
until he fell into it and drowned. For Narcissus neither water nor
nature existed independently and in its own right, separate from his
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xxii A History of Water

idea of it. He did not see the water and was blind to its significance,
even if – or perhaps precisely because – he was so familiar with it. He
was, after all, the son of the river god, Cephissus, and the water
nymph, Leiriope. Narcissus can be seen as a symbol of, on the one
hand, a civilization’s self-centredness but, on the other, of the
intellectual tradition which has long dominated social science, a
tradition which overlooks the boundaries and properties of nature –
and of water – and the dynamic interface with society.
Many things can be recaptured and relocated in the general
framework of a water history, so that despite all the differences,
paradoxes and contradictions in time and amongst societies, it may
be possible to discover a unity of history that is not a universal
history but a unity of life. A book with narratives of water control
from all over the world can give a vivid sense of a human past that
in certain aspects can be seen as fundamentally shared. While there
may be nothing that appropriately can be called universal values,
water control is definitely a universal predicament. Water control in
one form or another is one thing which all people at all times have
had and will always have in common, and they will forever have to
adapt to, and to control, the water that runs through their societies.

NOTES

1. The concept and study of la longue durée as a historical form is

connected to Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and other
historians of the Annales school. See Le Goff, J. (1992), History and
Memory, translated by Steven Rendell and Elizabeth Claman, New
York: Columbia University Press, pp. xxi–iii.
2. The well-known Chinese creation legend tells that the mythical
Emperor Yu managed to tame the waters and thus created the World.
On Sri Lanka the irrigation network formed the basis for a thriving
economy with a large agricultural surplus that sustained a vibrant
civilization for centuries. Close to Polonnaruwa, one can still see one
of the largest and most spectacular ancient tanks, the Parakra
Samudra, the sea of Parakrama, built by Parakramabahu 1 (1153–86).
3. Dynesius, M. and Nilsson, C.(1994), ‘Fragmentation and flow
regulation of river systems in the northern third of the world’, Science
266, pp.753–62.
4. Durkheim, E. (1904), The Rules of Sociological Method (New York:
Free Press, 3rd edn, 1966), p. 145.
5. Durkheim, op. cit., p. 34.
6. Marx, K. (1857–8), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) translated by Martin
Nicolaus, p. 410.
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Introduction: Water history is world history xxiii

7. Cuff, E.C. et al. (1992), Perspectives in Sociology (London: Routledge),

pp. 6–7.
8. Cuff et al, op. cit., p. 27.
9. Giddens, A. (1989), Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 7.
10. Giddens, op. cit., p. 11.
11. Giddens, op. cit., p. 632.
12. Giddens, A.(1991), ‘Structuration theory: past, present and future’, in
C. A. G. Bryant and D. Jary (eds), Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: A
Critical Appreciation (London: Routledge), pp. 203.
13. Giddens, A. (1993), New Rules of Sociological Method: a Positive
Critique of Interpretative Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp.
168–9.
14. Collins, H. M. & Pinch, T. (1982), Frames of Meaning: the Social
Construction of Extraordinary Science (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul).
15. See Bassin, M. (1996), ‘Nature, geopolitics and Marxism: ecological
contestation in Weimar Germany’, in Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, 21/2, pp. 315–41.
16. Wittfogel, K.(1957), Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total
Power (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press), 1981 edn, p. 100.
17. Wittfogel, op. cit., p. 27.
18. Wittfogel, op. cit., p. 49.
19. March, A. (1974), The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographic
Thought (New York: Praeger), p. 92.
20. Fradkin, P. L. (1984), A River No More: the Colorado River and the West
(Berkley: University of California Press); Harden, B. (1996), A River
Lost: the Life and Death of the Colombia (New York: Norton); Hill, C.
V. (1997), River of Sorrow: Environment and Social Control in
Riparian North India 1770–1994 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for
Asian Studies).
21. Worster, D. (1985), Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of
the American West (New York: Pantheon Books), p. 5.
22. White, R. (1995), The Organic Machine: the Remaking of the
Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang).
23. Tvedt, T. (2004), The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political
Ecology and the Quest for Economic Power (London & New York:
I.B.Tauris).

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