Breyfogle, N.B. and Brown, P.C. (Eds). (2023). Hydraulic societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History. Oregon State University Press. ISBN 9780870712371 (paperback; US$39.95) // ISBN 9780870712388 (e-Book; US$11.99)
(URL: https://osupress.oregonstate.edu/book/hydraulic-societies )
Christine Bichsel
University of Fribourg, Switzerland, christine.bichsel@unifr.ch
To cite this Review: Bichsel, C. 2025. Review of "Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History", Oregon State University Press, 2023, by Breyfogle, Nicolas B. and Philip C. Brown, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/382-hydraulic
Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History aims to undertake a critical reappraisal of Karl August Wittfogel’s (1957) controversial formulation of “hydraulic Societies” or “hydraulic civilisations”.
The introduction sets the stage with a quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005): “Water does not resist. […] But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it”. In that vein, the following nine empirical chapters explore how human societies have dealt historically with the properties of water as a fugitive element with a high degree of unpredictability and the inevitable tendency to flow downhill. The geographical scope for this analysis is East and Central Asia, including China, Japan, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula and present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Rather than presenting another reiteration of proving or disproving Wittfogel’s hydraulic hypothesis, the volume seeks to expand the scope for the analysis of water management and political power in three important ways. First, by way of mobilisation and productive combination of Wittfogel’s generic ideas with other theoretical approaches, most notably James C. Scott’s (1998) hypothesis of the modern state and Eric Swyngedow’s (2007) ideas about scales and technopolitics. Second, by moving beyond water management in the narrow sense of the term and by including interdependent fields such as forest management and erosion control. Third, by going beyond metropolitan master narratives to examine “local, small-scale decision making, ground-level social power dynamics and hydrological/geological formations determining how hydrology and society intersected” (p. 6). This last point is an important blind spot of Wittfogel, who stopped short of engaging critically with the narratives that served as a basis for his historical interpretation. Next, I discuss the contributions grouped by their geographical foci.
The two chapters focusing on China both address the environmental and social histories of the Yellow River. Lin Zhang’s chapter shows how the Yellow River became part and parcel of government schemes during Northern Song and Jin China (960-1234). She explores rulers’ strategic diversion of the river’s course to deter enemy armies, thereby hazarding the horrible consequences for large swathes of population considered less important for maintaining power. Ordering the river, she argues, meant ordering the world. Ruth Mostern, equally, stresses a longue durée perspective to reveal the degree of anthropogenic influence causing the erosion of the loess plateau alongside natural processes. She shows how historical processes of resettlement, sedentary agriculture and warfare on the plateau correlate with quantitative increases in the sedimentation rate. Both contributions show the massive extent and long history of anthropogenic influence, but also the incommensurability in human attempts to govern water at the scale of the Yellow River.
Both the contributions dealing with Central Asia focus on irrigation of its arid and semi-arid lands. Scott Levi’s chapter examines the history of irrigation expansion under the khanate of Khoqand in the Ferghana Valley. Rather than interpreting this as the khan’s asserting dictatorial power through centralised control over water management, he argues that the expansion was rather used to exert leverage over certain populations. Moreover, he shows how developments in the Ferghana Valley were closely connected to the ascent of Qing China and related favourable trading conditions, thereby representing a case of “early globalisation”. Beatrice Penati’s chapter provides an overview of recent scholarship of water management in Imperial Russian and Soviet Central Asia. She contends that existing analyses often conceive of “Russian” and “Central Asian” actors in a bipolar way and thus lack a nuanced analysis of hierarchies and power relations within Central Asian society. Both contributions caution that taking at face value dominant accounts of hydraulic politics –both Khoqandi and Imperial Russian –may lead to erroneous understandings of the actual relations of force at play.
Of the two chapters focussing on the Korean peninsula, David Fedman’s traces erosion control in colonial Korea. His is a story of Japanese narratives of a denuded landscape in Korea during the early 20th century, and of efforts to address this by the imperial Japanese government in collaboration with corporations and companies. His analysis expands the focus from riverine ecosystems to the forested landscapes that surrounded them. With the onset of WWII Japanese programs were halted, and the bald mountains decried in colonial Korea became widespread in Japan proper. Robert Winstanley-Chester picks up the story from the moment that Fedman’s chapter ends. He sheds a rare spotlight on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by examining how hydrology and hydrological engineering served the construction and maintenance of statehood in the form of “charismatic politics”. His chapter argues that the Potong River Improvement Project in 1946 became a key narrative for the dynastic rule of the Kim family, resurfacing in the Taegyedo Tideland Reclamation Project. Both contributions show that Korean landscapes were not just a result of colonial governance but shaped by wider geopolitics such as WWII, decolonisation and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The single-standing chapter on Taiwan by Ya-Wen Ku examines flood management under imperial Japanese rule. She probes the Japanese discursive framing of Taiwanese as vulnerable and dependent on the colonial government, while showing how at the same time colonial rule undermined Taiwanese long-standing expertise in locally managing floods. Moreover, she shows how colonial rule expropriated landholders under the pretext of flood management – a practice that in contemporary parlance would fall under “disaster capitalism”.
The two chapters on Japan examine engineering practices. Yasuaki Chino’s chapter explores the transition from natural materials to concrete and “modern” riparian engineering in Japan. He shows that while historically, this had been a decentralised practice, it only became centralised in the Meiji period with the first national government to have the authority and finances for riparian engineering at a national scale. Yet currently underway is a revitalisation of pre-modern forms of river engineering with recourse to natural materials, of which Chino provides a fascinating and detailed account. Finally, Shinichiro Nakamura’s chapter traces the history of design flood estimations in Japan, thereby showing the historical variability in rationale and assessment of flood risk. His chapter provides insight into socio-cultural and context-specific assessments of national hazards. Both chapters show that while seemingly technical and mathematical, civil engineering in Japan has been strongly shaped by political forms and requirements.
Read together, these chapters are a fascinating account of past hydraulic politics and practices in East and Central Asia with the multi-sited imperial and colonial relations. They do not limit themselves to a more conventional analysis of the British and French empires but include Russian, Japanese and Chinese imperial rule. Moreover, when read together, links emerge between different empires and forms of rule, such as between Qing China’s handling of the Yellow River and their concomitant shaping of Khoqand’s waterscape, or the parallels between Japanese imperial discourses and schemes for colonial Taiwan and Korea. There would be much potential for a closer examination of these links in the future.
A minor issue of the volume is that its guiding idea - hydraulic societies – ultimately remains little explored in the form of a synthesis. Does this idea continue to have conceptual and/or heuristic currency considering the insights from the chapters? How shall we engage with this idea in future research? A more sustained synthesis would have given the book an even stronger thrust.
References
Wittfogel, K. A. 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study in Total Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, J. C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Swyngedow, E. 2007. Technonatural revolutions: the scalar politics of Franco's hydro‐social dream for Spain, 1939–1975. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1): 9-28.
Atwood, M. 2005. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. London: Canongate.
