Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World

Review by Sohini Sengupta

Corey Ross. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World. Princeton University Press, 2024. pp. 464. Illustrations, maps. US $39.95.

The most palpable crises worldwide today are centered around water: whether it be unequal access to potable water, acute droughts or floods, the displacement of thousands due to damming, or the dangerous rise of sea levels in coastal regions. Seated in the boiling pot of these crises—the Global South—Corey Ross asks: can we trace a genealogy of our present problems to the “historic quest to conquer aquatic nature” (3)?

Ross’s Liquid Empire is a global and trans-imperial history of efforts at conquering and exploiting water. It covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following primarily British, French, and Dutch colonial territories in the continents of Asia and Africa. Noting a “terrestrial emphasis” in environmental histories of European empires, Ross identifies the enclosure and control of water as essential to the project of colonization (6). Liquid Empire is an account of imperial technological evolutions aimed at transforming aquatic ecosystems, and the persistence of the underlying ideologies of conquering the hydrosphere in a decolonized, globalized world. In other words, Ross offers a perspective of nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism as a “hydro-social enterprise” (19).

Moving away from diffusionist narratives of technological transfer, Ross instead paints a more nuanced picture of the emergence of largescale hydraulic technological growth within the empire: one of “mutual interaction, the circulation of ideas and practices within and beyond imperial boundaries, selective appropriation, unintended consequences, and the emergence of resistance to imperial innovations” (18). Across eight chapters, Ross weaves together a holistic narrative of the empire’s encounters with and attempts to rationalize and enclose water in its many forms, with each chapter focusing on individual forms of aqueous encounters. The first chapter examines riverine paths that enabled imperial mobilities into Asian and African territories. The second and third chapters explore colonial efforts at controlling seasonal rhythms of rivers and patterns of irrigation, and making “productive” swamps, deltaic and arid zones through the construction of “hydraulic frontiers”. This is followed by accounts of flood control efforts under imperial rule in Indochina. Chapters five through seven probe other avenues of controlling water: fisheries, urban plumbing and sanitation, and the development of colonial hydropower. The final chapter demonstrates the persistence of remnants of water-centric colonial ideology in a world after empire. 

Ross meticulously traces the unpredictability of colonial waters that the British, French and Dutch encountered on their paths—whether it be the Nile basin in Africa or the monsoons in India. The aim of rendering the colonial landscape predictable and rationalized accompanied the imperial goals of efficient extraction; “mathematical models that could be comprehended, calculated and controlled for the purpose of maximizing distribution, productivity and income generation” emerged as new trends for hydraulic engineers (67). “Financial profitability” and “sociopolitical stability” were fulcrums of large scale transformations in irrigation, canal-making, damming, and urban plumbing that the imperial engineers and planners undertook (84). Ross shows how industrial over-development in the Global North drove the perspective of the Global South as an underexploited “gigantic storehouse of resources” (216). Ross also demonstrates how incomplete knowledge or assumed superiority frequently doomed colonial projects, eg. irrigation—which were often less efficient when compared to precolonial or local methods. While exalted as monumental projects that rendered valuable unproductive waters, large-scale British hydraulic projects often had lasting negative consequences and even grave errors: from widespread displacement of people and property by damming, to quick depletion of maritime fisheries due to incorrect estimations of stocks.  

Yet, among the longest lasting effects of colonial efforts at rechanneling water was, Ross shows, a large-scale polarizing effect among local populations that would outlast the lifespan of empires and shape national demographics. The disjuncture between movers of hydraulic infrastructure and those affected by them “entailed substantial costs” (391). Ross argues that potential solutions to the present water crises demands local participation and advocacy in technological plans that must be multiscalar (392). An even more crucial remediation is reconsidering the “baked in” attitudes towards water—the imagination of water as a commodity (392).

Compared to the rich exploration of the colonial account, Ross’s argument in the final chapter is provocative and risks losing some of the great nuance and detail that marks the majority of the book. The persistence of imperial attitudes towards water following the independence of colonized states is a central argument in the book. Ross contests theses by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Amitav Ghosh that posit the period of decolonization as one of accelerated consumption (and consequently, colonialism as a limiting factor for industrialization of third world countries). He shows how this acceleration was only a reflection of attitudes embedded into the newly independent territories by imperialism itself, and that their demands to modernize was only intensified by aspirations to reach the status of their previous conquerors. Ross’s argument—in itself an important one—however seems to stand on top of frequent glossing-overs of differences in manifestations of water-based politics in the age of decolonization. Ross’s substitutive logic in describing postcolonial social distinctions also appears to avoid probing the evolution of pre-existing complex hierarchies within native populations concerning the access to water—caste, for example—which refuse to abide by narratives of easy binaries of native/colonizer being replaced by rural migrant/urban elite (362).

Ross is nevertheless highly sensitive and attentive towards native agency and vulnerability across a diverse range of social conditions: from public protests against the Gold Coast Waterworks Ordinance in 1934 to the Save the Narmada movement in 1993 (263, 357). His account not only upholds the agency and responses of locals and natives, but also gives water its “own form of agency,” emphasizing it as an “actant” (19). He does so not by ventriloquizing rivers or dams, but by highlighting the repeated and remarkable human failures to contain the element, to render it knowable and predictable. On its surface a detailed account of the “human-led purpose of capitalizing on the productive potential of aqueous spaces”, the underlying, more complex role of water in binding “people, technologies, cultural practices, socio-economic structures, legal–political institutions and the wider biophysical environment” shines through in Liquid Empire (19). 

Is Ross’s work then yet another boat in the widening rapids of all things water in the field of history—from Ocean Histories to histories of hydraulic technologies? The answer would be an emphatic ‘no’. Ross’s work is highly self-aware of its position in the field, and undertakes the important task of synthesizing and surveying the field just as it makes original observations following primary sources. In fact, the text makes a remarkable state-of-the-field study in bringing into conversation a vast set of secondary literature (the number of enlisted secondary sources exceeds that of published primary ones) from the domains of both environmental history and colonial history: from Sunil Amrith to Christopher Bailey. 

The most important provocation offered by Ross is the call to rethink the human subject’s self-identified relation with water. Ross provides a sharp emphasis on imperialism as a transformative phenomenon that inaugurates large-scale commodification and reining in of global —and especially, colonial—waters. The forty illustrations and maps—adequately allowing the reader to imagine the scales of colonial hydraulic transformations and their coexistence with native technology—also defy terra-centric norms in order to turn the focus squarely on the shape of water. Ross’s is an ambitiously large and well-structured project; it provides an important framework for discussing the relationship between colonial societies and water, and is useful to environmental historians and historians of empires alike through its nuanced synthesis of the fluid histories of European empires in Africa and Asia. For the curious reader beyond disciplinary demarcations, the book is an invitation to reconsider how one sees human relationships with water today and to trace the roots of the globe’s urgent water crises further back than the recent days of globalization, and consequently, an invitation to reconsider solutions to our contemporary problems with a broad historical lens. 

Sohini Sengupta

University of Chicago