<i> Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History. </i> By Sunil Amrith. New York: Basic Books, 2018. xviii + 398 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $35.00, e-book $19.99.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook Reviews Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History. By Sunil Amrith. New York: Basic Books, 2018. xviii + 398 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $35.00, e-book $19.99.Patryk ReidPatryk Reid Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, University of Pittsburgh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book is a pioneering history of water in modern Asia from the perspective of India. Few scholars attempt to incorporate as many dimensions of the hydrological cycle into understandings of the past. Sunil Amrith maintains the focus on water, in a region where supply is scarce and unpredictable, through an impressive tour of problems in politics, economics, culture, and science and technology from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The result is a model for normalizing aquatic factors within historiography.Amrith examines continuities in water-human relationships over two centuries of social ruptures related to British colonialism. He shows how successive Indian states worked to modernize their management of water in order to facilitate the growth of economies like irrigated agriculture and resilience to natural disasters like drought. In eight chapters, Amrith draws on a broad range of primary and secondary sources to show how scientists, engineers, and policy-makers continuously worked to know, predict, and control various aquatic forms. His book is praiseworthy for highlighting the irony of these efforts, pointing to the seldom analyzed “unruliness” of water. As he observes of the interwar era, “iron confidence in the conquest of nature, expressed by engineers and scientists and nationalists, alternated with a sense of vulnerability before nature’s power and its unpredictability” (p. 155).This ambiguity is most apparent in Amrith’s analysis of climate history, which forms a primary thread of the book. He traces Indian meteorology to British institutions of the late nineteenth century, highlighting the contributions of both foreign and colonized scientists to understandings of the unpredictable monsoons on which much of the country depended for agriculture. By the early 1900s, India had robust institutions for studying climate. They contributed key knowledge to global concepts like the El Nino Southern Oscillation and participated in collaborations like the International Indian Ocean Expedition of 1959–65. Unfortunately, they produced few predictive applications, he explains. Instead, engineering advances in river management protected the economies of some regions, while the others continued to rely on traditional knowledge to mitigate the whims of monsoons.The contrast between water environments and human borders is another major thread in the book. Amrith analyzes geopolitical implications of the major rivers traversing South and East Asia. Most of them originate in the Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau region, and many travel along and across borders of several countries. He highlights how transboundary rivers were integrated in territorial disputes. After the 1947 partition of British colonial lands, for example, India’s dominion over part of the upper Indus River became a form of leverage over Pakistan in the contested Jammu and Kashmir regions. This channel’s headwaters in Tibet, meanwhile, factored into border tension between India and China. Amrith weaves evidence of this anxiety into the larger narrative of their one-month border war in 1962 and argues that China’s continuing borderland settlement and damming increased the potential for conflict over water.Amrith’s concern with aquatic frontiers and conflicts reflects the book’s strengths and weaknesses; its breadth makes it compelling, important, and sometimes frustrating. The author frequently causes confusion by alluding to water “conflicts” that are actually non-physical disputes. It is an example of the larger composition of the book, where the author’s enthusiasm for the manifold, interdisciplinary history of water leads to sometimes incongruous statements and lines of analysis, abruptly shifting between water forms and information, such as from a large-scale context to an engineer’s biography. Nevertheless, his survey reflects a nuanced understanding of Asian environmental history, and it incorporates Indian connections to neighboring countries, usually China. While Amrith does not prove that “nowhere has the search for water shaped or sustained as much human life as in India and China” (p. 5), his periodic comparisons of the two countries situate India in global water management trends, including in terms of transnational governance and technology exchange. But this approach is not substantial or systematic enough to justify his claim to covering an “Asia” beyond India.Even so, the book’s modeling of multidimensional water history overshadows its drawbacks. The prose is very accessible, masking its author’s mastery of regional and thematic literatures and its importance to future research. Unruly Waters belongs in every library and should be read by students and experts of South Asian and environmental history. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 25, Number 1January 2020 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 197Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz075HistoryPublished online November 12, 2019 © 2019 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.