On the Des Plaines River, just south of Chicago, the United States Army Corps of Engineers is at war with Asian carp. The fish were first imported to America in the 1970s to eat up the weeds and algae in catfish ponds and sewage treatment lagoons around Little Rock. But they soon escaped into the Arkansas River, and from there into the Mississippi River basin, disrupting food chains and driving native fish species to near extinction. Their conquest of North America’s waterways has been halted only because the army has for the last two decades maintained a barrier of electric charge across the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects the Des Plaines to the Great Lakes basin, home to a fifth of the world’s surface fresh water. It’s a drastic response to a surprisingly widespread pathology of modernity: fish in the wrong place. Less surprising, the pathology has its origins in European colonialism. The transplantation of fish in British India began in earnest in the second half of the 19th century, when angling enthusiasts stocked the streams of the Nilgiri Hills with American rainbow and European brown trout, then the rivers of Kashmir, the Himalayas and Travancore. Their counterparts in Uganda released the insatiable Nile perch into the fragile freshwater habitat of Lake Victoria. Some later experiments were motivated by more noble aims. Colonial officials in India thought the larvicidal mosquito fish of North America might prevent the spread of malaria. In French-occupied Madagascar, carp were introduced to boost local food supply. But whatever the intention, the results were almost always the same: aquatic colonisers destroyed indigenous environments.
The ecological dynamics of imperialism – or those relating to land at least – are by now fairly well known. Forty years ago, the historian Alfred Crosby argued that the colonisation of the New World had less to do with the Europeans who sailed across the Atlantic than with the ‘portmanteau biota’ they carried with them. Rats spread disease; roaming pigs and cows extended the frontiers of property and dispossession; wheat turned the pampas and plains of the Americas into ‘neo-Europes’, fertile and familiar landscapes that would later attract immigrants from the Old World and feed its working classes. Although seldom masters of these changes, Europeans benefited from them nonetheless. Corey Ross, in Liquid Empire, cites the presence of brown trout in Kashmir as an example of the way in which, after the 19th century, the environmental scope of colonialism extended beyond land to take in rivers, lakes, coasts and oceans. Aquatic biota, like their terrestrial counterparts, became increasingly standardised and engineered for European pleasure and profit. Throughout Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia, imperial officials reclaimed land from the sea for cultivation and trade, fixed rivers in place to protect roads, railways and bridges, and designed vast irrigation schemes to sanitise crowded cities or to make deserts and barren wastelands suitable for agriculture.
Unlike Crosby’s ‘Columbian Exchange’, these feats of hydraulic engineering were deliberate, and they very often failed. The conversion of the Sundarbans mangrove forests to taxable agricultural land – instrumental to the ‘permanent settlement’ of Bengal – left recently established coastal communities exposed to cyclones: in 1876, 215,000 people died in a storm in the Meghna estuary. In Hanoi, a sewage system heralded as a monument to the French civilising mission became a breeding ground for plague-bearing rodents. Residents rich enough to have plumbing in their homes reported rats climbing out of their toilets.
European powers were trying to exploit the aquatic resources of their colonies long before the 19th century, but their reach had always been constrained. From the 15th to the 18th century, the rivers of West Africa had funnelled goods to merchants on the coast. French trading companies attached themselves to forts and factories at the mouth of the Senegal River. Gold, gum and slaves came downstream from the interior, while manufactured goods – cloth, alcohol, guns – went the other way, the river serving as a conduit for extraction but also for the militarisation of its hinterlands.
At the turn of the 19th century, a combination of new technology and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade spurred some entrepreneurs to seek new opportunities upstream. In 1832 the Scottish shipbuilder Macgregor Laird and a consortium of Liverpool merchants formed the African Inland Commercial Company and took two steamers up the Niger. They were seeking ‘the amelioration of uncivilised man’, but above all palm oil. The expedition was a disaster: only nine of the crew of 48 survived; the rest died of malaria. Laird and his contemporaries were undeterred. Later ventures went loaded with quinine and cannon, and within decades the British and French were sending large quantities of groundnuts and palm oil downstream and then out to the world market. Further south, Leopold II’s plunder of the Congo was achieved through a similar combination of nature and technology. More than two hundred miles of railway were laid by coerced labourers under brutal conditions, enabling traders to send ivory and rubber from the Upper Congo at Léopoldville to Matadi near the coast. But the river was key. One contemporary described the railways of the Congo as mere ‘tributaries of the navigable watercourses’.
With the coasts settled and the river valleys increasingly exploited, colonial attention turned to the desert. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s a team of French engineers, inspired by Ferdinand de Lesseps’s success in building the Suez Canal, made plans to create a vast inland sea between Biskra in Algeria and Gabès near the Tunisian coast. Sponsored by the government and the Academy of Sciences, the scheme sought to consolidate France’s military and commercial control of the region. But some of its promoters had grander ambitions. The military officer and geographer François Élie Roudaire believed that covering 13,000 square kilometres of desert with water would bring humidity and rainfall to North Africa and restore fertility to a region that had once been known as the ‘granary of Rome’. Both Roudaire and de Lesseps were deeply influenced by the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, who ranked species and societies according to their mastery over the environment. Beavers occupied an elevated position in his hierarchy of animals because they built dams; thus France could demonstrate its superiority to other civilisations through its technological prowess – by digging canals that linked oceans, or by flooding the Sahara.
Roudaire’s vision never materialised, but the desire to geoengineer Europe’s southern frontier endured into the 20th century. In the 1920s, the German architect Herman Sörgel proposed constructing a dam at Gibraltar that would drain the Mediterranean and turn it over to crops. When that plan failed to garner interest, he looked for Lebensraum in the desert: he wanted to dam the Congo, expand Lake Chad and irrigate the Sahara from the south. After the war, a group of French engineers suggested dropping fifteen hydrogen bombs on Tunisia in order to clear a waterway to the newly discovered oil reserves of southern Algeria.
No less ambitious, but far more effective, was the irrigation of the Punjab under the Raj. In the 19th century, the British had regarded the region as a vast scrubland of little concern. It had no resources of economic value and its only inhabitants were nomadic herders or, even more intermittently, invading Baloch and Pashtun tribes. Between 1880 and 1940, colonial engineers harnessed the five tributaries of the Indus, which ran through the region, to construct a hydrological infrastructure of unprecedented scale, making ten million acres of ‘waste land’ suitable for settlement and cultivation. Nine planned canal colonies sprang up around the Punjab, populated by more than a million peasant migrants or pastoralists who had been forcibly domesticated. The landscape was transformed into what the historian Neeladri Bhattacharya called a ‘regime of squares’: each new village was flanked by pillars marking out a grid of squares of 27.7 acres each, which were then further subdivided into 25 equal plots. Each of these was designated a ‘killa’; the process of enclosure became known as ‘killabandi’.
This hyper-rational approach allowed the British to regulate the distribution of water, and to control not just the organisation of space but its occupation. One official, James Douie, explained that his job was to ‘weed out’ undesirable migrants: ‘dotards and mere boys’, ‘village loafers’, ‘the physically and mentally unfit’. From a military and economic perspective, the canal colonies worked. Insubordinate nomads, robbed of their grazing pastures, were forced to settle in the new townships, while the permanent supply of water transformed desert scrub into fields of wheat and cotton. By the 1940s the Punjab was recognised as the ‘breadbasket’ of the Raj, and generated more tax revenue than any other Indian province.
The canal colonies were hardly an unmitigated success. Malaria and cholera epidemics were frequent. Canals seeped into waterlogged killas. Nomads who resisted settlement poisoned the livestock of newly arrived peasants, burned their crops and invaded their fields with cattle. Having been lured by British promises of lands ‘overflowing with milk and honey’, the first generation of immigrants arrived to a still barren grid of half-dug canals, pestilence and the hostility of displaced locals. The anger of the new arrivals erupted in 1907, when thousands of zamindars launched a protest against the colonial government which soon fused with broader movements for land reform and self-rule. Even the British expressed a modicum of guilt about their transformation of the Punjab. A Canal Colonies Report of 1933 lamented the replacement of the ‘goat herd’s pipe and the quavering love-song of the camel men’ with ‘the klaxon of the motor-lorry’; ‘the nomad himself,’ the report continued, ‘has been pegged out, Prometheus-like on his 25 killas, while the vultures of civilisation bury their ravenous beaks in his vitals.’ Bhattacharya calls this the ‘pathos of development’ and argues that it was one of the most enduring legacies of improvement projects. Having claimed mastery over water, and fixed people to the land, the colonial imagination yearned for pristine nature and pastoral freedom.
Like most recent histories of attempts to re-engineer the natural world, Liquid Empire wrestles with the legacy of the American political scientist James C. Scott, who died last year. In Seeing like a State (1998), Scott produced the kind of sweeping account of modernity that gives other scholars something to argue with. Drawing on case studies that ranged from 18th-century Prussian forestry to agrarian reforms in the Soviet Union and Tanzania and urban planning in Brazil and India, Scott developed a theory of ‘high modernist’ state power which, through cadastral surveys and monocrops and grands boulevards, tried to impose order on society and nature, and in doing so destroyed everything that made them function. The book was in many respects the culmination of what Scott later described, with some qualification, as an ‘anarchist’ research agenda which had begun with his work on the resistance strategies and moral economies of South-East Asian peasants. For critics, it suggested a worldview that was more romantic and libertarian than anarchist (the anthropologist Fernando Coronil titled his review of the book ‘Smelling Like a Market’). But it also signalled an environmental turn in Scott’s work that continued with his final two books, Against the Grain (2017), on the agrarian origins of coercive city-states, and In Praise of Floods, a posthumously published essay on rivers and the deep history of civilisation’s doomed attempt ‘to manage the unruly natural world’.
It makes sense that Scott would turn to rivers. There is a rich tradition of scholarship on the relationship between the control of water and the power of the state. In the 1950s, Karl Wittfogel, a German Marxist turned anti-communist, proposed that the so-called ‘oriental despotisms’ of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and above all China had a common cause: in each case the state assumed the responsibility for large irrigation projects, which in turn had to be supervised by elaborate bureaucracies and centralised, authoritarian elites. Historians with very different ideological commitments have made similar claims about the way the irrigated state’s domination of nature has enabled its domination of people – in the American West, for instance, or on Caribbean plantations.
More recently, and for obvious reasons, the idea that states have ever been able to exert control over complex natural systems has become less and less convincing. The latest scholarship argues that all forms of hydrological intervention are inherently unstable. The construction of dykes and dams for flood control requires the removal of vegetation, which causes erosion, salinisation and sedimentation, which in turn raises river levels and increases the likelihood of floods. The historian of China Mark Elvin called this process ‘technological lock-in’: once begun, the harnessing of rivers becomes increasingly counterproductive and increasingly necessary. The hydrologic engineer Raphael Kazmann once referred to the (ongoing) efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi as ‘planned chaos’: ‘The more planning they do, the more chaotic it is.’
For most of our history, humans have accepted the natural volatility of rivers: hunter-gatherers stayed on high ground during periodic floods and returned to the valleys when the waters receded. But with the onset of the Neolithic revolution, people began to settle in the flood plain, looking to permanently exploit its fertile soil through fixed-field agriculture. This meant controlling rather than adapting to the river. It also marked the beginning of what Scott, repurposing a concept from Against the Grain, calls the ‘thin Anthropocene’, when humans first began to irreversibly engineer the environment. As cities and fields spread around valleys, upstream banks were cleared of forests and rivers began to carry more sediment, which made them more likely to burst their banks or rapidly shift course. During two centuries of agricultural and military expansion under the Song Dynasty between 1050 and 1280, the Yellow River changed channel eight times. This was disastrous for the peasants of the North China Plain, but also, Scott is at pains to point out, for non-human species that had to adapt to a more volatile environment. Against the anthropocentric logics of sedentism and statecraft, Scott imagines an ‘all-species riverine democracy’: he stages a ‘town meeting’ in which the snow carp, the hairy-nosed otter and the Ayeyarwady river dolphin make the case for floods, and condemn the ‘world-historic land and water grab in which a single species has seized an entire landscape from its indigenous inhabitants and unilaterally colonised it’.
Like much of Scott’s later work, In Praise of Floods is often self-consciously provocative and deliberately reductive. He concedes, begrudgingly, that river engineering has brought some benefits – to health, agriculture and navigation – but argues that its main legacy has been ‘iatrogenic’ disorders: the erasure of wetlands, the loss of habitats, the extinction of species and the increasing likelihood of destructive floods. There is a certain charm to Scott’s attempt to give voice to non-human species, but his eagerness to shock readers out of their anthropocentrism results in some questionable rhetorical choices, such as his description of modern agriculture as ‘a kind of horticultural and mammalian apartheid’. Political distinctions and causal arguments start to get fuzzy. The draining of the Fens, Mussolini’s reclamation of the Pontine Marshes and Saddam Hussein’s clearance of the wetlands of southern Iraq ‘are only three examples of what has been a worldwide process’. The transition from ‘thin’ to ‘full-blown’ Anthropocene was a matter of scaling up technologies and political forms that had existed for thousands of years; the industrial revolution was ‘perhaps the culmination of the earliest quest of our species to domesticate fire and make it do our bidding’.
By rooting planetary climate change in the Neolithic age, Scott flirts with letting modernity off the hook – a curious late-career development for one of modernity’s most dogged and insightful critics. But In Praise of Floods does serve as a reminder that human disruption of natural systems began long before the 19th century. The hydrological projects of European empires had countless antecedents. Ross acknowledges these continuities. Unlike Scott, he doesn’t make a general argument about the history of water management, or about how it might change our understanding of colonialism and modernity. Instead, Liquid Empire can be read as an illustration of what the transition from thin to thick Anthropocene entailed, and what Scott might mean when he says that the modern era has been ‘marked by a massive scale of modification’ in the long-running agrarian conquest of rivers. Having exhausted their own watersheds, European states proceeded to do the same overseas, outsourcing the ecological costs of urbanisation and economic growth to distant colonies, and consolidating, as Ross notes, a pattern of unequal exchange ‘that continued, even accelerated, after the colonial era’.
In Bali , the irrigation of rice paddies has for centuries been regulated by a network of water temples. Situated at the upstream limit of each water system, these Hindu shrines have a calendar of rites that determine the rhythms of irrigation and cultivation, ensuring enough water for every farmer and co-ordinating the synchronised flooding of fields after harvest. The practice survived centuries of colonial rule by the Dutch, who couldn’t recognise the practical functions of apparently religious institutions but were happy to tax the abundant rice harvests the irrigation systems yielded. Everything changed, though, after the Dutch left Indonesia and the Green Revolution got underway. From 1970, farmers were instructed to replace native rice with hybrid, high-yielding varieties, to apply fertiliser and pesticide, and to plant as soon as possible after harvest instead of following the traditional schedule. Science replaced the water temples, and the results were disastrous. Short-term gains in harvests were followed by unpredictable water shortages and unprecedented outbreaks of pests and disease. Western-educated officials were only convinced of the existence and benefits of the traditional system when they were presented with a computer simulation model by the anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing.
The case of the water temples in Bali shows that societies can manage the complexities of hydrological systems while also meeting the demands of cultivation. It also suggests that the environmental history of European empire doesn’t end with decolonisation. The quasi-colonial schemes of the Green Revolution were as consequential ecologically as the infrastructure projects that had been established under formal colonial rule. Throughout the global South after the 1960s, Western organisations worked with domestic elites to promote new strains of wheat and rice, fertilisers and irrigation schemes – ostensibly to feed megacities such as Lagos and Dhaka, but also to forestall demands for land reform and to counter the spread of communism. The beneficiaries tended to be already affluent farmers who could afford new seeds and water pumps; smallholders often fell into debt as higher yields lowered prices. In the irrigated tracts of the Punjab, Ross writes, the Green Revolution fuelled ‘not only intense social conflict but also a wave of suicides among hard-pressed farmers who could not get enough water’.
The Green Revolution on land was accompanied by a ‘Blue Revolution’ at sea. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982 extended the maritime jurisdiction of states to two hundred nautical miles from their coasts through the creation of ‘exclusive economic zones’, which denied foreign boats access to fishing grounds. The idea was to protect the oceanic resources of developing countries and to promote their maritime industries. But cash-strapped states soon rented out their new aqueous ‘territories’ to foreign interests. The coastal nations of North-West Africa signed ‘fishery co-operation agreements’ with the EU that left their seas overfished. In South-East Asia, the enormous expansion of the shrimp-farming industry since the 1980s has destroyed mangrove forests and displaced coastal communities that relied on the land, fuel and food they provided. Although it promised sovereignty and sustainable growth after decolonisation, the Blue Revolution amounted to what, in their book Capitalism and the Sea (2021), Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás call one of the ‘largest enclosures in human history’.
Ross is judicious on the matter of whether the hunger for the planet’s resources over the last fifty years can be attributed entirely to the legacies of imperialism. ‘In the wake of decolonisation,’ he writes, ‘hydraulic interventions generally intensified rather than subsided.’ In India, for instance, around four thousand dams were built between 1947 and 2000. The ‘dam fever’ that swept through Asia and Africa, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, was funded by Western investment, enabled by institutions inherited from colonial regimes and shaped by an ‘imperial view of nature as something to be conquered and remade to serve human ends’. Yet such water projects were embraced by postcolonial leaders. For Nasser, the Aswan High Dam was a ‘symbol of moral struggle, a symbol of the abolition of imperialism’. Nehru referred to his government’s massive hydraulic projects – Bhakra Nangal in Punjab, the Hirakud Dam in Odisha, the Damodar Valley project in West Bengal – as ‘the temples of new India’.
Hydropower was a cornerstone of newly won sovereignty, not because of a pent-up Neolithic urge to conquer the watershed, but because it was considered essential to securing autonomy and self-determination. The new dams were no less ecologically disruptive, however. The world’s 58,000 large dams are now recognised as a major driver of climate change. Their reservoirs emit methane, especially in tropical regions, as the organic matter in the areas flooded to create them breaks down, and cumulatively they have interrupted a sixth of annual river flows, preventing the cycling of nutrients into the sea and undermining the food webs of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton. In other words, technological lock-in has gone global, and the best we can hope for is planned chaos on a planetary scale.