A History of Water series explores all aspects of water – social, cultural, political,
religious, historical, economic and technological - from ancient times
to the present day. The contributors examine the changing histories of
water as a private or common good; the politics of water at local,
urban, national and international level; water in cities; great river
plans; dams; river biographies; and images of water in religion, myth,
literature and art. Empirical and ethnographic case studies from around
the world feature.
VOLUME I: Water Control and River Biographies
Editors: T. Tvedt & E. Jakobsson
Description This book with narratives of water control from all over the world can
give a vivid sense of a human past that in certain aspects can be seen
as fundamentally shared. While there may be nothing that appropriately
can be called universal values, water control is definitely a universal
predicament. Water control in one form or another is one thing which
all people at all times have had and will always have in common, and
they will forever have to adapt to, and to control, the water that runs
through their societies.
Contents Introduction: Water History is World History (Terje Tvedt and Eva Jacobsson)
Part I: Great PlansSeizing Favours from Nature: The Rise and Fall of Siberian River Diversion (
D.F. Duke)
• The World’s Largest Contiguous Irrigation System: Developments,
Successes and Challenges of the Indus Irrigation System in Pakistan (
M.A. Kahlown, A.D. Khan and M. Azam)
• Of Flumes, Modules and Barrels: The Failure of Irrigation
Institutions and Technologies to Achieve Equitable Water Control in the
Indus Basin
(G.E. van Halsema and L. Vincent) • Controlling the Waters in Twentieth-century China: The Nationalist State and the Huai River (
D.A. Pietz) • The Chinese Way of Harnessing Rivers: The Yangtze River (
F. Padovani) • Water Control and Agricultural Development: Crafting Deltaic Environments in South-East Asia (
F. Molle and D.T. Tuân) • Environmental Risk in Water Resources Management in the Mekong Delta: A Multi-Scale Analysis (
F. Miller) • Living with Water: Bangladesh Since Ancient Times (
A. Kamal)
Part II: River Biographies The History of the Tama River: Social Reconstructions (
M.W. Steele) • ‘Seeing Like the Prussian State’: Re-engineering the Rivers of Rhineland and Westphalia (
M. Cioc) • The River has Recorded the Story, Living with the Hawkesbury River, Sydney, NSW, Australia (
B. Simmons and J. Scott) • Poverty, Water and Environmental Degradation: The Langat River Basin, Malaysia (
C. Siwar and S. Idrus)
Part III: Water in Cities Water and Wastes in Medieval London (
R.J. Magnusson) • Critical Decisions in Pittsburgh Water and Wastewater Treatment (
J.A. Tarr and T.F. Josie) • Water, Modernity and the Demise of the Bacteriological City (
M. Gandy) • Socio-Economic Implications of Water Supply in Nigerian Urban Centres: The Case of Ibadan (
I.O. Adelekan) • The Political Ecology of Water Supply in Chennai, South India (
E. Weber)
Part IV: Organizing Water Keeping Running Water Clean: Mining and Pollution in Preindustrial Japan (
P.G. Sippel) • Management of Wetlands in Relation to River Basins- a Study from South-West India (
E.J. James) • Public Water Supply in Guernsey, Channel Islands: Engineers, Entrepreneurs, Ownership and Control in an Island Setting (
V. Gardiner) • The Mfongo Irrigation Systems on the Slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania (
M. Tagseth) • Alkalinity, Salinity and California Irrigation: The Role of Eugene Woldemar Hilgard (
W.E. Pittman)
Part V: Debating Water The Rescue of English Coastal Waters and the Role of Environmental Pressure Groups (
J. Hassan) • Management of the Mekong River Basin: Contesting its Sustainability from a Communication Perspective (
M.T. Lang) • The Bío–Bío Project and the Mapuche-Pehuenche People of Chile (
I. Norbø)
• Contributors • Index
About the Editors: T. Tvedt is Research Director in the Faculty of Social Science,
University of Bergen and a Panel Member of UNESCO’s World Water
Assessment Program.
E. Jakobsson is the Senior Research Scientist at Stavanger University College, Norway.
VOLUME II: The Political Economy of Water
Editors: T. Tvedt & R. Coopey
Description The contributors to this volume use a range of methods and hypotheses
to probe the complexity inherent in the history of water and its
provision. In measuring the extent to which provision went to one
sector of the population rather than another, and the ramifications of
this, Schmid and Hallström, for example, emphasise the utility of
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methodology, amongst a number of
techniques they employ. Their study of Linkopping and Norkopping in
Sweden constructs a spatial and temporal analysis which enables light
to be shed on issues of unequal provision and its origins, and to track
the development of water technologies and systems.
Contents Introduction: Water as a Unique Commodity (
Richard Coopey and Terje Tvedt)
Part I: Urban and Local Water Politics The Pipe-Bound City in Time and Space: Applying GIS to the Historical Development of Two Cities (
T. Schmid Neset and J. Hallström) • Inequities in Urban Water Supply in India: Municipalities in Andhra Pradesh (
C. Ramachandraiah) • Social Movements and Conflict over Water in Mexico (
P. Avila) • Inequality and Social Exclusion: Access to Drinking Water in Cochabamba, Bolivia (
C. Ledo)
Part II: National Water Politics Wittfogel and Hydraulic Despotism (
Neville Brown) • Reshaping the ‘Political’: The Nile Waters of the Sudan (
M. El Zain) • Water Resource Administration and Racial Inequality in South West Africa (
J. B. Forrest) • British Colonial Water Legislation in Mandatory Palestine (
K. Gaarde) • A Retreat from Centralised Water Management? The Israeli Case (
E. Feitelson) • Market-Oriented Sustainable Water Resource Management in China (
X. Mao) • Water and the Transformation of Agriculture in Bulgaria (
M. Ilieva and I. Iliev) • Irrigation and State Formation in Ancient Korea (
B. W. Kang) • Water and Development in Cambodia: A Historical Perspective (
C. Sophal and S. Acharya) • Gender, Poverty and Water in Pakistan (
M. Khan-Tirmizi)
Part III: International Hydropolitics The Nile as a Legal and Political Structure (
J. W. Dellapenna) • Nile Basin Co-operation: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century (
Y. Arsano) • Transboundary Water Resources: Mexico, the USA and the Water Treaty (
B. Sanchez) • Developing Lesotho’s Water Resources: The Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme (
M. Thabane) • Great Lakes Fisheries: International Response to their Decline and the Lamprey/Alewife Invasion (
P. Scarpino) • Energy and Environmental Security: The Syr Darya Crisis of Central Asia (
K. Lange) • Fish vs. Power: Salmon, Science and Society on the Fraser River (
M. Evenden)
Part IV: Water Law and Legal Issues Water Quality as Property: Industrial Water Pollution and Riparian Law
in Nineteenth-Century USA (
J. Paavola) • Regimes, Regulations and
Rights: Urban Water Use in the Kathmandu Valley (
A. Regmi) • Water as
Property in the American West (
R. B. Naeser and M. Griffin Smith) •
Changing Water Rights in Mexico: Local Availability and the
Reallocation of Groundwater Rights (
G. V. Dyrnes and B.
Marañón-Pimentel)
Part V: Theoretical Issues My Land, My Water, Your Problem: Co-dynamic Processes and the
Development of Appropriate Water Policy Tools (
P. Jeffrey, M. Lemon and
B. Jefferson)
• Contributors • Index •
About the Editors: R. Coopey is with the Department of History at the University of
Aberystwyth. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the
Royal Society of Arts. University College, Norway.
T. Tvedt is Research Director in the Faculty of Social Science,
University of Bergen and a Panel Member of UNESCO’s World Water
Assessment Program.
VOLUME III: The World of Water
Editors: T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard
Description This volume is an attempt to present the complex picture of how water
has been conceptualized as a medium for control and social hierarchy,
for understanding and cultural elaboration, and for religious and
divine interaction, all interdependent spheres, each necessitating the
other. Water is both nature and culture, and its profound character
makes the substance unique in the context of social construction,
having epistemological and ontological consequences for both the social
and natural sciences. The chapters aim to convey the idea that with
water as a point of departure it is possible to re-work dominant
conceptual legacies about nature and society and ‘realism’ and
‘constructivism’, and to overcome the nature-society dualism in
traditional analyses. Humans live in worlds of water: water is used to
define human life-worlds and the worlds are sustained through water.
Contents Introduction (Terje Tvedt and Terje Oestigaard)
Part V: Water as Text and Meaning Rivers as Text: From Pre-Modern to Post-Modern Understandings of
Development, Technology and the Environment in Canada and Abroad (
J. L.
Manore) • Constructing a Myth of Purity: The Marketing of Welsh Water
(
O. Roberts) • ‘Seeing is Believing’: Perceptions of Safe Water in
Rural Yoruba (
E.-M. Rinne)
Part VI: Water in Literature and Art ‘Of Frogs’ Eyes and Cows’ Drinking Water’: Water and Folklore in
Western Kenya (
V.I. Khasandi-Telewa) • ‘The Waterside Dwellers Sleep
Thirsting’: Cultural Interpretations of Water in a Rural Community (
F.
K. Lukalo) • The Pastoral, the Monumental and What Lies In-Between:
Images of Dams and the Riparian Landscape (
D. C. Jackson) • Water
Images in Latin American Cinema: The Films of Fernando Solanas (
J.
Askeland and Á. Ramírez)
Part VII: Water in Religion and Mythology A Christian Perspective on Water and Water Rights (
A. Armstrong and M.
Armstrong) • River Cult and Water Management Practices in Ancient India
(
Joisea Joseph Kodiyanplakkal)
Part VIII: Rainmaking and Life-giving Waters Science in the Social Sphere: Weather Modification and Public Response
(
S. Matthewman) • River and Rain: Life-giving Waters in Nepalese Death
Rituals (
T. Oestigaard) • ‘The Wealth of These Nations’: Rain, Rulers
and Religion on the Cuvelai Floodplain (
M. McKittrick) • The Lozi Flood
Tradition (
C. M. Namafe)
• Contributors • Index
About the Editors: T. Tvedt is Research Director in the Faculty of Social Science,
University of Bergen and a Panel Member of UNESCO’s World Water
Assessment Program.
T. Oestigaard is Research Fellow at Center for Development Studies, University of Bergen, Norway.
VOLUME IV: Ideas of Water from Ancient Societies the Modern World
Editors: T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard
Description How has water been perceived in different societies and across
different eras of world history? How have these changing conceptions
informed and influenced our ideas about society and ourselves? In “The
Idea of Water” leading international scholars explore the rich record
of our ideas, from the beliefs of early societies to the latest
scientific views on the nature of this unique substance. Ranging across
all aspects - scientific, cultural and religious - this important work
both challenges conventional interpretations and understanding of water
in nature and represents one of the first attempts to provide a history
of our changing conceptions of the role and significance of water in
human society.
ContentsA History of the Ideas of Water: Deconstructing Nature and Constructing Society (Terje Tvedt and Terje Oestigaard)
PART I FROM THE BIG BANG TO THE HYDROLOGICAL CYCLE Water and Cosmos: From the Big Bang to the Creation of Water and Earth
(
Robert Kandel) • Water in Science and Scientific Discovery (
Philip
Ball) • Water and the Development of the Concept of Chemical Substance
(
Paul Needham) • Water, its Flux, its Cycle and its Power: The Romantic
Turning Point in the History of the Water Idea (
Rodney Farnsworth)
PART II IDEAS OF SOCIAL USES OF WATER The Aqueduct as Hegemonic Architecture: A Case from the Roman Republic
(
Rina Faletti) • Social Uses of Water in the Ancient Mediterranean:
Public Baths (
Garrett G. Fagan) • The Rule of Water: Uncertainty and
the Cultural Ecology of Water in South India (
David Mosse) • Water and
Sanitation Services in History: Motivations, Expectations and
Experiences (
Petri S. Juuti, Henry Nygård and Tapio S. Katko) •
Cultural Ideas of Water and Swimming in Modern Europe (
Susan C.
Anderson)
PART III FROM JUDAISM AND ISLAM TO THE MAYAN WATER COSMOLOGY Bathing in Divine Waters: Water and Purity in Judaism and Islam
(
Francesca de Châtel) • Purification, Purgation and Penalty: Christian
Concepts of Water and Fire in Heaven and Hell (
Terje Oestigaard) • How
Water Transcends Religions and Epochs: Hydrolatry in Early European
Religions and Christian Syncretism (
Dieter Gerten) • Water in
Aboriginal Australia (
Veronica Strang) • Rain, Snakes and Sex – Making
Rain: Rock Art and Rain-making in Africa and America (
Tore Sætersdal) •
Shaping Beliefs, Identities and Institutions: The Role of Water Myths
among Ethnic Groups in Yunnan, China (
Zheng Xiao Yun) • Flood Myths
(
Wendy Doniger) • Water in the Cosmovision and Symbolism of Mesoamerica
and Peru in the Pre-Hispanic Period (
José Luis Martínez Ruiz, Daniel
Murillo Licea and Jorge Martínez Ruiz)
• Contributors
About the Editors:
T. Tvedt is Research Director in the Faculty of Social Science,
University of Bergen and a Panel Member of UNESCO’s World Water
Assessment Program.
T. Oestigaard is Research Fellow at Center for Development Studies,University of Bergen,Norway.
VOLUME V: Rivers and Society: From Early Civilizations to Modern Times
Editors: T. Tvedt & R. Coopey
Description Rivers and Society explores the ways in which humanlriver relations
have shaped important historical transformation processes. With
examples ranging from explorations of classical agrarian civilizations
such as the Indus, Angkor and Maya, to analyses of the role of water in
the modernization process of countries such as Spain, Britain and
Japan, the international contributors shed new light on the ways in
which the key relationship between humans and water has given rise to
new forms of social organization, new technologies and economic
activities.
Contents PART I WATER SYSTEMS AND DEVELOPMENT A ‘Water Systems’ Perspective on History (
Terje Tvedt and Richard Coopey)
PART II WATER SYSTEMS AND AGRICULTURAL CIVILIZATIONS The Indus Civilization and Riverine History in North-Western India and
Pakistan (
Gregory L. Possehl) • The Development of the River Nile and
the Egyptian Civilization: A Water Historical Perspective with Focus on
the First Intermediate Period (
Judith Bunbury) • Osiris and the
Egyptian Civilisation of Inundation: The Pyramids, the Pharaohs and
their Water World (
Terje Oestigaard) • The Maya Collapse: Water,
Drought and Volcanoes (
Richardson B. Gill) • The Mekong River System
and the End of the Angkor Civilization: A Water Historical Perspective
(
Dan Penny) • The Historical Evolution and Anthropogenic Influences on
the Yellow River from Ancient to Modern Times (
Qiang Zhang, Chong-Yu
Xu, Tao Yang and Zhen-Chun Hao) • Elemental Resources and Aquatic
Ecosystems: Medieval Europeans and their Rivers (
Richard C. Hoffmann) •
Nile River Flows and Political Order in Ottoman Egypt (
Fred H. Lawson)
• Lesser Man-Made Rivers: The Aflaj of Oman and Traditional Timing of
Water Shares (
Harriet Nash)
PART III WATER SYSTEMS AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA Water Control in the Netherlands with a Focus on the Period 1750–1900
(
Jacobus de Vries) • Changing Societies produce Changing Rivers:
Managing the Rhine in Germany and Holland in a Changing Environment,
1770–1850 (
Toon Bosch) • Changing River Regimes on the Kanto Plain,
Japan, 1600–1900 (
Roderick I. Wilson) • Water and the British Take-Over
of India (
Graham Chapman) • The Neva as a Metropolitan River of Russia:
Environment, Economy and Culture (
Alexei Kraikovsky and Julia Lajus) •
A Historic Survey of the Danube Catchment: From Classical Civilization
to the End of the Nineteenth Century (
Miklós Domokos) • The Severn
1750–1850: Nature, Power and Rationalisation (
Richard Coopey) • The
History of Flowing Water Policy in Sweden: From Natural Flow to
Industrialized Rivers (
Eva Jakobsson) • The Hydraulic Paradigm and
Production of a New Geography in Spain: Origins and Historical
Evolution between the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries (
Leandro del
Moral Ituarte) • Venetian Rivers after the Fall of the Republic: French
and Austrian Hydrology and the Venetian Heritage (Eighteenth–Nineteenth
Century) (
Salvatore Ciriacono) • Exploitation and Innovation along the
Lower Mississippi, 1750–1900 (
Martin Reuss)
• Contributors • Index
About the Editors:
T. Tvedt is Research Director in the Faculty of Social Science,
University of Bergen and a Panel Member of UNESCO’s World Water
Assessment Program.
R. Coopey is with the Department of History at the University of
Aberystwyth. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the
Royal Society of Arts, University College, Norway.
VOLUME VI: Water, Geopolitics and the New World Order
Editors: T. Tvedt, Prof. Graham Chapman & Roar Hagen
Description As the world’s population continues to grow apace and an increasing
number of countries aspire to a twenty-first century lifestyle so the
question of access to water resources becomes ever more critical. This
timely volume shows how the struggle to control water is an issue of
growing geopolitical importance. Drawing on a wealth of examples, and
revealing how current problems are not necessarily new as often
suggested, the international contributors provide a deeper theroetical
analysis of the issues, enabling a clearer understanding to be obtained
of how experience in one region can properly be related to that of
other regions.
Contents PART I REFLECTIONS ON COLLECTIVE ACTION, COLLECTIVE POWER AND GEOPOLITICS Water, Geopolitics and Collective Power in the New World Order (
Roar
Hagen, Graham Chapman and Terje Tvedt) • You Can’t Get There from Here:
Theoretic Puzzles of Collective Action (
John Waterbury) • Environmental
Geopolitics and Hydro-Hegemony: The Case of Palestine and Israel (
Mark
Zeitoun) • Water: A Source of Wars or a Pathway to Peace? An Empirical
Critique of Two Dominant Schools of Thought on Water and International
Politics (
Terje Tvedt)
PART II WATER, POWER AND GEOPOLITICS: HISTORICAL EXAMPLES Aquatic Warfare in Historical China (
Ralph D. Sawyer) • Water in
Medieval Warfare (
Helen J. Nicholson) • The Peace of Westphalia and the
Water Question: A Perspective for the Benefit of the Other (
Pierre
Beaudry) • ‘Drawn by Blind Greed’: The Historical Origins of Criticism
Regarding the Destruction of the Amazon River’s Natural Resources (
José
Augusto Pádua) • Water and the Partitioning of Southern Africa: The
British Presence on the Shire River from the s to (
Dean Kampanje-Phiri)
PART III WATER, POWER AND GEOPOLITICS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Continental Divide: The Issue of Freshwater in Canada–USA Relations
(
Frank Quinn) • The Water Framework Directive: Redesigning the Map of
Europe? (
Duncan Liefferink, Mark Wiering and Pieter Leroy) • The
Trans-boundary Rivers on the Iberian Peninsula and the Water Management
Regime between Spain and Portugal (
Jos G. Timmerman) • The Strategic
and Political Use of Potential Climate Change in Conflict: The Case of
Somalia (
Peter Haldén) • The Highlands: A Shared Water Tower in a
Changing Climate and Changing Asia (
Jianchu Xu) • Space, Identity and
Water: South Asia’s North-East and the Brahmaputra (
Graham Chapman) •
From Damming Rivers to Linking Waters: Is this the Beginning of the End
of Supply-Side Hydrology in India? (
Rohan D’Souza) • Critical
Hydropolitics in the Indus Basin (
Daanish Mustafa) • The Geopolitics of
Water in the Middle East: Turkey as a Regional Power (
Marwa Daoudy) •
Shared Water and Changing Geopolitics and Power in Central Asia
(
Zainiddin Karaev) • Geopolitics of Groundwater (
W. Todd Jarvis) •
International Law and Moderations of Physical Geography: • The Nile
Setting (
Tadesse Kassa) • Global Institutions and Water Governance
(
Ruth Langridge)
• Contributors • Index
About the Editors: T. Tvedt is Research Director in the Faculty of Social Science,
University of Bergen and a Panel Member of UNESCO’s World Water
Assessment Program.
Prof. Graham Chapman, formerly Fellow and Director of Studies in
Geography at Downing College Cambridge, Professor of Geography at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, and at Lancaster University,
sometime Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla,
and the Centre for Advanced Studies, Oslo. His prime area of research
has been in the Geography of South Asia.
Roar Hagen is Professor in Sociology at the University of Tromstd,
Norway. His focus of interest is theoretical sociology, especially
theories of collective action, systems theory and functional
differentiation as the principle of integration for modern societies.