Thinking with and about rivers

The same holds true for histories of rivers. There is no canonical way to narrate a river’s history, and, indeed, rivers are present in a multitude of historical fields. However, even if not explicitly categorized as such, the history of rivers or a river typically falls into one or more of the broad areas of inquiry that animate environmental history. To illustrate, an environmental history of rivers may track how a particular river’s topography changed over time – such as through shifting riverbanks or catastrophic flooding – and how those changes affected the humans living near it. It may explore how human action, such as dam-building, polluting, or irrigation schemes, altered a river. Or it may reflect on how different groups of people thought about rivers as philosophical tools, artistic subjects, or economic resources.Footnote ⁸ Often, these three themes are intertwined in a single river history. With such expansive criteria for inclusion in the category of river history, it is little wonder that recent historiographic essays on the subject employ varying thematic organization and remain, necessarily, incomplete.Footnote ⁹ Here, too, we acknowledge that it is impossible to consider all the ways in which rivers have shaped history and thence been studied by historians. Instead, our focus on imperial rivers invites us to think about how they operate in discourses of power. In one discourse, power is the entrée to control and profit. In the other, it is the focus of complex negotiations among various human and nonhuman actors.

A historiography of power, control, and profit along imperial rivers is necessarily haunted by the ghost of Karl Wittfogel and his theory of hydraulic despotism. This theory contends that humankind’s constant desire to manage the environment gave rise to a new, despotic social formation of increasingly centralized political control. Wittfogel uses evidence from China’s Shang dynasty as basis for a larger argument that an empire’s need for large-scale irrigation works created an “Oriental despotism” that was incapable of following the Marxian trajectory of social progress that Western nations purportedly could.Footnote ¹⁰ Written during the height of twentieth-century decolonization, Wittfogel’s work channels the ideological longings of imperial twilight, of a belief that infrastructure development was justification enough for centuries of extraction and oppression.Footnote ¹¹ His work has been widely and justly criticized as deterministic, stereotypical, and – in one memorable review by Canadian Sinologist E.G. Pulleyblank – repugnant.Footnote ¹²

And yet, it possesses a certain staying power. Donald Worster engages directly with Wittfogel in his Rivers of Empire, a foundational work in American environmental history that demonstrates how the United States conquered its arid, western territories through technocratic hydraulic management.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, the idea that empires, particularly modern capitalist empires, are somehow fundamentally antithetical to ecological sustainability animates much early environmental history. For instance, Guha and Gadgil’s This Fissured Land theorizes that in India, premodern endogamous groups based on caste and tribe each found an ecological niche – fishing, foraging, handicraft production, etc. – that allowed the entire community to live sustainably with the forest. It was only with the advent of colonialism and capitalist extraction that deforestation, erosion, and immiseration became an intractable problem.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, John F. Richards writes of the ecological devastation wrought by the expansion of early modern empires, such as the coercion and economic pressure first the Dutch East India Company and then the Qing Empire placed on indigenous Taiwanese to produce deerskins for trade; in just a little over a century the deer population on the island had collapsed.Footnote ¹⁵

Such readings, however, give outsized power to imperial governments. More recent historiography suggests that “colonial environments and peoples were not so easily remade.”Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, while an imperial government may have nurtured pretensions of ecological domination, their plans were often limited by preexisting social and environmental constraints. Therefore, the power of an empire flounders on the ungovernable riverine landscape. Common to the articles in this special feature – as well as much river historiography written in the past twenty-five years – is how the language, forms, and imaginative limits of imperial modernity define the possibilities of human-river relationships. From David Biggs’ account of the ecological pacification of the Mekong Delta by French and American military forces in the twentieth century to the imperial railways that crisscrossed the Gangetic delta and blocked the natural flow of water in Iftekhar Iqbal’s The Bengal Delta to Rohan D’Souza’s censure of large-scale dam building in eastern India by the British Empire, historians have regularly shown how imperial efforts to curtail or supersede a river’s power fail, in part, because of the paucity of intellectual tools available to them to imagine human-river relationships that deviate from a modernist, capitalist fantasy of control and profit.Footnote ¹⁷

Richard White’s The Organic Machine introduces a different, expansive definition of power that highlights the ways the concept serves as a point of negotiation for humans and nonhumans alike. White moves beyond the state-centric definition of political power that animates river histories in the Wittfogel-Worster intellectual lineage and instead begins by aligning power with energy. White famously defines the river as an “organic machine… an energy system which, although modified by human interventions, maintains its natural, its ‘unmade’ qualities.”Footnote ¹⁸ In his telling, this energy is sometimes produced by muscle and found in the humans paddling their canoes to trade posts or in the salmon swimming upstream to spawn. It is found in the water pulled from the river to evaporate and condense in steam-powered canning factories. The power of the river’s current also rotates twentieth-century electrical turbines. White notes that even when humans attempt to assert their dominance over the river’s power with their dams, weirs, and boats, the Columbia remains an independent entity that also exerts its own power over the humans living in its watershed.

This mutually constitutive, or hybrid, interpretation of nature has influenced a generation of river histories. It upsets the anthropocentric vanity behind the imperial dream of environmental domination and instead illustrates how the natural world is neither pristine wilderness nor human-made artifice, but rather “a complex mingling of the two.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, as Mauch and Zeller say in the introduction to Rivers in History,

For instance, in Ruth Mostern’s biography of the Yellow River, over two millennia of Chinese imperial administrators built weirs, canals, and levees to control flooding and construct transportation networks. Many of their designs were intended to harness the river’s shi (勢), which Mostern translates as power, for their own goals.Footnote ²¹ But in her telling, the story of the Yellow River is far more than a powerful river on an inexpertly engineered floodplain prone to catastrophic inundation. Instead, her focus is on the imperial government’s – from the Han Dynasty onward – continued inability to connect deforestation and erosion on the Loess Plateau with increased sedimentation and inundation on the floodplain. Their inability to see the true source of the problem constrained the government’s technical power.

Another instance of this tension between the power of a river and of the imperial imagination takes place in North America in Christopher Morris’ The Big Muddy. He shows his readers the first moment the French empire squelched through the mud of the Mississippi Delta, literally unable to see it for what it was. At the turn of the eighteenth century, La Salle sailed through the Gulf of Mexico and entered the mouth of the Mississippi River, but then left, believing he had not yet found it and continuing his search for the river further west. The breadth and silt of this body of water were beyond his comprehension of what a river could or should be, and therefore he was unable to see it.Footnote ²² Later, when imperial settlement began in earnest, Morris claims that the French and then Americans managed it by “first imagining the valley as a dry place, and then by technologically separating land and water.”Footnote ²³

Such hybrid relationships are also prevalent in cultural histories of rivers in which humans’ perceptions and manipulations of natural streams “depend not only upon individual and institutional interests but also upon the language and forms of mediation available in particular times and places.”Footnote ²⁴ Therefore, human action on a river and human response to a river’s actions are both mediated by the technological and conceptual tools at hand. As David Blackbourn illustrates in The Conquest of Nature, rivers – in this case the Oder, Rhine, Ruhr, and others in Germany – can serve as emotional touchstones for the formation of the modern nation-state even as humans are straightening, damming, and embanking them. Blackbourn argues that the naturalization of human intervention in the riverine landscape took place over time, as the residue of yesterday’s “progress” acquired a patina of “naturalness.”Footnote ²⁵ In this way, even highly engineered riverscapes could become sites of nostalgic longing for a Romantic interpretation of Germany’s green and glorious past. Similar interweaving of water, technology, and culture can be seen along the Ganges, where debates about the river’s relationship to material and religious pollution continue in history books, science laboratories, and political discourse to this day.Footnote ²⁶ In all of these instances, the discourses of power in river history are as multi-directional and interwoven as the channels of a river itself.

Imperialism and transformations of river management in modern Asia

Asia is a crucial site for investigating the multifaceted entanglements between rivers and human societies because of its hydrological characteristics, socio-economic features, and complicated trajectories of political contestation during the modern period. Modern Asia is a region with extremely high population density, and it is still economically dependent on agriculture, but it contains limited freshwater that is only concentrated in particular parts of the region. Adding to the uneven geographical distribution of water, most parts of Asia are influenced by the monsoon climate and hence also confront uneven annual distribution of precipitation and seasonal floods. The growing impact of climate change worsens the inequalities, making water in dry regions even more scarce while threatening wet regions with more serious flooding and interrelated disasters. These water problems are further complicated by continuing state initiatives to build river-engineering megaprojects to address the region’s irrigation and energy crises. Particularly along the Himalayan rivers, China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and other neighboring states are competing to build more large dams, which have pressing implications because these megaprojects have triggered geopolitical disputes, caused risks to the livelihoods of numerous people, and increased the vulnerability of riverine ecosystems in this region.Footnote ²⁷ To understand and respond to these riverine crises today, this special feature reckons with Sunil Amrith’s claim in Unruly Waters that we need to turn to the historical transformations of Asia during the modern period. Many riverine problems in Asia today can be traced back to a set of transformations concerning the conceptualization, technology, and institution of river management that occurred between roughly 1800 and 1945. The development of these new conceptualizations, technologies, and institutions was intertwined with the expansion of modern imperial power on a global scale.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, several states – mostly Western European states but later also including Japan and the United States – accelerated the pace of their imperial activities across the world. This wave of imperial expansion colonized many parts of South and Southeast Asia and enforced a chain of port cities in East Asia to constitute “informal empires of trade, unequal treaties and extraterritorial privilege.”Footnote ²⁸ The empires created or expanded in the nineteenth century tried to tightly integrate their much-enlarged overseas territories through efficient resource extraction, dominance over economic and financial networks, and technological developments in transportation and communication. These imperatives also transformed empires’ relationships to the management of nature. The empires that expanded from the nineteenth century onwards displayed increasing aspirations for subjugating nature through “an alliance of science, the maximizing producer, and the state.”Footnote ²⁹

This more utilitarian way of conceptualizing and controlling nature was also reflected by the new demands of river management in the expanding empires. Imperial administrators and engineers constructed new systems of canals and embankments in their colonial settlements to ensure efficient irrigation and flood control because they attempted to maximize the production of raw materials as well as state revenues from agriculture.Footnote ³⁰ And various imperial agents tried to expand trade from coastal ports to the interiors of major continents by reconfiguring formidable waterways and extending the realm of secure navigation upstream. Driven by these aspirations for more efficient agrarian production and more extensive commercial circulation, three new trends of river management became prevalent in the colonies or realms of influence of many expanding empires: First, the increasing emphasis on both “improvement” and “conservation” in discourses about the management of riverine environments. Second, the valorization of technocracy and the elevated authorities of hydraulic engineers. Third, more direct state intervention in river management projects.

In imperialist discourses on the riverine environment from the nineteenth century onwards, the ideas of “improvement” and “conservation” both gained more relevance and became more interlinked. The goal for the productive exploitation of natural resources impelled colonial administrators and engineers to plan agriculture according to the idealization of well-watered lands. They hence often proposed to “improve” the riverine environments in their settlements by controlling floods that used to be integral parts of local agrarian cycles and rechannelling water to “places where they deemed it to be lacking.”Footnote ³¹ Additionally, various agents of imperial powers also gradually recognized the limits of production because of environmental degradation, which evolved into a critique of overexploitation; conservationist modes of thought became influential in many imperial settlements by the mid-nineteenth century. In places such as India and Japan, conservationist concerns propelled administrators and engineers to expand the scope of “improvement” by planning riparian management from rivers’ headwaters to their mouths. Engineers then not only tried to address floods and intensify canals in downstream areas but also attempted to restore water supply and combat desiccation through afforestation and other preservationist measures.Footnote ³² Moreover, discussions on “improvement” and “conservation” were often intertwined with discourses justifying imperial control. While the promise to bring material improvements was used to justify colonial rule, conservationist proposals were frequently underpinned by a discourse blaming indigenous people for environmental degradation through misuse and, again, justifying imperial intervention.Footnote ³³

The urge to uphold the promise of improvement and ensure conservation increasingly compelled engineers to view rivers as “systems whose interrelated parts need to be controlled.”Footnote ³⁴ Particularly after the mid-nineteenth century, a professional cadre of engineers emerged in India, Europe, the United States, and Japan, among other places, who tried to achieve systematic control of water by applying approaches deemed “scientific,” such as quantitative measurement and monitoring of water flows, using mathematical models to plan irrigation systems that would maximize production, and implementing hydraulic machines “run by steam, petroleum, or electricity.”Footnote ³⁵ A growing valorization of technocracy allowed hydraulic engineers to enjoy increased power, authority, and mobility. In late-nineteenth-century India, for example, an engineer was “not only a man of science” but also “a ruler of men,” who could plan hydraulic works without much bother for the wishes and interests of other social groups.Footnote ³⁶ Engineers from the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States actively sought employment in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and advocated for their plans to “[reestablish] hydraulic equilibrium with the tools of modern engineering.” Correspondingly, beginning in the late nineteenth century, several Asian states, such as Japan and China, sent well-educated men to Europe and the United States to receive training in hydraulic engineering and related fields, expecting them to introduce back new technical approaches for “reasserting hydraulic order.”Footnote ³⁷

The aforementioned conceptual and technological trends were all interconnected with transformations of state powers. While agents of imperial powers, as mentioned above, tended to mobilize the discourses of “improvement” and “conservation” to justify imperial control, political reformers and revolutionaries in places such as China also employed these discourses in a flipped way, using environmental degradation and the lack of technological improvements to criticize the contemporary state. In turn, as engineers became more inspired to implement technocratic and centralized hydrological regimes, they also needed more state backing to realize their projects. Starting from the late nineteenth century, large-scale hydrological projects that involved direct interventions of imperial states were carried out in many parts of Asia – such as the Indus Basin Projects in India and the Yodo River Improvement Works in Japan – which paved the way for more orchestrated reengineering endeavors by the early twentieth century.Footnote ³⁸ This evolving alliance of technocracy and state intervention later in the 1930s led to the formation and wide-range transposition of the Tennessee Valley Authority multipurpose river management model, which was premised on the idea of fully exploiting rivers to promote economic growth through modern technology and state control. ^{Footnote 39} The mutually reinforcing trends of modern state building and the evolution of technocratic approaches to river management, as laid out above, became increasingly prevalent across Asia from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, hence offering rich cases for tracing the rise of “high modernism” and reflecting on its multifaceted impacts within the Asian context. James Scott, among others, encapsulates “high modernism” as “a sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied” in various fields of human activity, particularly in terms of “taming nature,” and he observes that the modern state became more deeply involved in realizing and arousing this vision from the late nineteenth century onwards.Footnote ⁴⁰ Through cases of river management in different parts of Asia against the backdrop of imperialist expansions, this special feature joins and complicates earlier conversations on “high modernism” by recovering what on-the-ground historical processes intensified the interactions between the riverine environment, technocratic ideology, and state control during the modern transformation of Asia as well as reflecting on the political, social, and ecological implications of these processes till today.

Overarching scope of the special feature

Studies on the unfolding of these overarching trends in Asia have fallen into separate historiographies of imperial river management within a particular national context, without much comparison of the shared processes and local variations across Asia. This is partly rooted in the material features of rivers. Because rivers normally run through the inland sphere of one or a limited number of political entities, the boundaries of which became more entrenched during the modern period, historical documentation of rivers often guides scholars to pay more attention to the national context or the macroscopic global context while overlooking inter-Asian connections. In this special feature, we foreground the perspective of inter-Asian comparison because to historicize the multifaceted interactions between modern imperialism and the riverine environments in Asia, we need to more comprehensively analyze how imperial ethos, technologies, and institutions of river management were carried out, resisted, or transformed in varied local contexts. Histories of rivers in Asia are ripe with hydrological, political, and techno-social diversity. Asia is the home of both some of the world’s largest rivers, such as the Ganges and the Yangzi, and short rushing rivers, such as those in the Japanese archipelago.Footnote ⁴¹ Different parts of Asia also reflect complicated relations with colonial empires during the modern period: Some political entities, such as India and Vietnam, were once under colonization. Some other places, such as the treaty ports in China, were forced to constitute informal empires of semi-colonial settlements and extraterritoriality. At the other end of the spectrum was the case of Japan, which turned to colonial expansion itself in the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, even within the same political entity, there might exist regional contrasts in river management because of divergent techno-social traditions. For instance, historians of Vietnam generally agree on the sharp contrast between the development of river management in the Red River Delta versus that in the Mekong Delta. While the former experienced uninterrupted processes of dyke-building and flood control since the first century, large-scale hydraulic projects in the Mekong Delta started much more recently in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴² All these hydrological, political, and techno-social variations in Asia can inspire us to more precisely synthesize the impacts of modern imperialism on rivers in Asia and open up new directions for analyzing the contrasts and contestations concerning imperial river projects under various local contexts.Footnote ⁴³

This special feature builds on the panel that Erica Mukherjee and Yiying Pan organized at the 2022 Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, chaired by David A. Pietz. The panel developed from the observation that rivers have the dual potential to support or impede the agricultural, communication, and commercial ambitions of empires. Bringing together cases from India, China, and Japan between the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, the panel proposed the “riverine environment” as a springboard for comparing histories of imperial control in modern Asia. This special feature goes beyond the original scope of the panel: We have extended the temporal framework by also attending to historical processes in the early modern period. We have also expanded the geographical range by adding a case from Southeast Asia. Although the four papers gathered here concentrate on different regions and discuss varied aspects of river management, they share two goals to enrich the scholarship on the interactions among rivers, political power, and modern imperialism. First, all the papers pay attention to the particular eco-social characteristics of rivers and articulate how these riverine conditions on the ground facilitated, resisted, or reshaped imperial approaches to political control and economic development. Second, the special feature as a whole aims to problematize the divides between the early modern period, the modern period, and high modernism through historicization. Collectively, the papers contextualize modern empires’ approaches to river management within long-temporal processes of managing and reconfiguring rivers in Asia from the precolonial period to the point of high modernism in the mid-twentieth century. This notion of long-temporal processes allows us not only to better trace where contemporary river problems in Asia come from but also to more precisely identify the crucial junctures when problems scaled up or underwent sharp transitions.

Individual case studies

This special feature begins with Takehiro Watanabe and Takeshi Ito’s article on the Kushiro River in Eastern Hokkaido. It traces transformations of the Kushiro River along with the political transition from the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) to Imperial Japan (1868–1947), concentrating on the multifaceted roles of the river during the colonization process of Hokkaido. The hydrological features of the Kushiro River displayed the potential to both facilitate and disrupt state territorial expansion. It had long served as the channel for the state to survey new lands, extend trade networks, and expand agricultural and industrial production. But certain segments of the river were formidable and tended to capsize expedition vessels commissioned by the state. Then, the increasing problems of flooding and topsoil erosion in the late nineteenth century alerted the state to refrain from overexploitation of riverine resources and violent hydraulic reengineering. Tracing long-temporal changes from the early modern to the modern period, Watanabe and Ito articulate both the continuity and the contrasts between the respective river management policies of the Tokugawa and the Meiji governments. Both governments tried to turn the Kushiro River into infrastructure for territorial control, but with different focuses, strategies, and degrees of intervention. During the Tokugawa period, the shogunate collaborated with its vassals, merchants, and indigenous Ainu headmen to create a trade-centered, locally grounded approach to river management that was quite different from the strategy later employed by the Meiji state. It reconceptualized the Kushiro River as the infrastructure of more thorough state control that also involved frontier defence, agrarian settlement, and industrial development. Therefore, the Meiji state shifted to more technocratic and coercive river policies, such as large-scale hydraulic reengineering and forced dispossession of indigenous riverine practices. Intriguingly, instead of flattening the policy transition between the Tokugawa and the Meiji reigns as a simple divide, Watanabe and Ito demonstrate that this transition was shaped by complicated regional incidents and dynamics during the late Tokugawa period.

Erica Mukherjee’s article sits at the cusp of steam-driven, nineteenth-century modernity, and demonstrates the tenuousness of that new social formation by narrating the construction process of the first steam-powered dredging vessel built by the East India Company (EIC) for distributaries of the Ganges River in the Bengal Presidency in the 1820s. Her narrative begins by highlighting the care the EIC lavished on this vessel, care inspired by its seeming embodiment of the qualities of Britishness and modernity in its metal and wood. Throughout the 29 months of the engine and vessel’s construction on the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta, EIC correspondence returned again and again to the theme of the steam engine being a British import and how that status uniquely qualified it for its forthcoming work to straighten and deepen rivers in Nadia District – in other words, to “improve” them for faster and more reliable commercial shipping. This fantasy of steam-driven improvement fell apart, however, when the draught of the vessel ended up being too deep to float on the rivers it was meant to dredge. Mukherjee uses the flurry of letters written in the wake of the vessel’s failure to point to fractures in the Company’s belief that steam-powered modernity was possible on the tropical rivers of India. She argues that the ultimate failure and abandonment of the vessel was not due to insurmountable technical difficulties but rather to a failure of imagination by the EIC administration. They did not believe the mercurial rivers of Nadia District could be regulated by the intervention of a single steam-powered dredging vessel.

Yiying Pan’s article also looks at the contested interactions between steam shipping technology and the riverine environment, but in a different context. It looks at the formation of regular steam shipping on the formidable Upper Yangzi River in China between the 1870s and the 1920s. The article centers on a particular type of riverine condition: rapids (tan灘) – fierce and unpredictable currents descending like small waterfalls, which were densely distributed throughout the Upper Yangzi River. As Pan illustrates, the Upper Yangzi rapids had actively shaped the knowledge and practices of the historical actors they encountered, including the Chinese shipping groups on the ground, European pilots who conducted hydrographic surveys at the turn of the twentieth century, and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) officials who aimed to establish and regulate commercial steam shipping service. By foregrounding the importance of rapids, Pan reminds us to look beyond the imperial powers and the narrative of subjugation when analyzing the global expansion of steam technology from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As Pan shows through new archival sources, the complexity and constant variations of rapids compelled European pilots to recognize the limits of charts, sailing directions, and standard instruments in assisting navigation. Instead, British and other foreign agents learned to transform their ways of organizing steam shipping in terms of vessel design and infrastructure allocation and, most importantly, to incorporate the local shipping groups who possessed experiential knowledge of rapids as constituent parts of the steam shipping system rather than displacing them. Pan also notes that as semi-colonial institutions, such as the CMCS, became more entrenched in the Upper Yangzi Region, their publications (which later became the main references for historians) tended to marginalize the role of local experiential knowledge even though these institutions continued to rely on such knowledge, which exemplified an ironic contrast between practices on the ground and selective historical documentation.

Corey Ross’s work on earthworks along the Red River Delta in Vietnam also highlights the importance of going beyond narratives of simple imperial domination when studying the riverine history of Asia. Ross employs a framework of disaster studies to demonstrate how French imperial ambitions in the region were first stymied and eventually toppled by a mix of social, ecological, and infrastructure constraints. Beginning in the 1890s, Ross notes that while French engineers may have wanted to employ ostensibly modern water infrastructure techniques in the Red River Delta, they ultimately built on the dikes and other earthworks created by the Vietnamese in the precolonial era. This meant that the large-scale imperial infrastructure exacerbated the flaws in the existing system rather than correcting them. By the 1930s, the delta was extremely vulnerable to famine, both through catastrophic flooding and a drying up of the irrigation system. Throughout this period, who ultimately controlled the earthworks was fractured and contested, but the French imperial government’s attempts to claim credit for the infrastructure also meant they were assigned blame for the catastrophic famine of 1944–1945, which contributed to the end of their colonial rule. Throughout this narrative, Ross highlights the unstable regime of imperial water control in the Red River Delta and how it fatally harmed French political ambitions.