A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world's most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.
Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities-but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.
Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world's waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life. Corey Ross is director of the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His books include Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World. "Ross locates the origins of our current environmental crisis in the age of European imperialism in the global tropics, expertly showing how water was not secondary to imperial aims and relations but central to them. Liquid Empire is a timely and necessary book."-Andrew Denning, author of Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa
"Ross deftly synthesizes a scattered literature to show how engineers of European empire employed water control to consolidate political control. Ross's prose is crisp, his research broad, and his choice of lens inspired-because almost everything is connected to water somehow. Liquid Empire is a superb addition to the environmental history of modern European imperialism."-J. R. McNeill, author of The Webs of Humankind: A World History
"Corey Ross has written a timely and erudite book that highlights the colonial legacy of how contemporary global climatic trends intersect with regional water vulnerabilities. Marshalling evidence of terraforming across the European empires-from the Niger River through the Nile, sweeping across the major deltas from Bengal to Irrawaddy and Mekong-Liquid Empire is a field-shifting book on the nature of power as told through water and imperial designs upon it."-Debjani Bhattacharyya, author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta "A seminal and ground-breaking study."
