Article ID: CBB671867232

Engineering Edens on This 'Rivered Earth'? A Review Article on Water Management and Hydro-Resilience in the British Empire, 1860-1940s (2017)

unapi

This article presents an overview of the management of fresh water in the British Empire from the 1860s to the 1940s. We argue that imperial water management shaped and responded to the imperatives of diverse ecologies and topographies, contrasting political and economic agendas and, not least, different colonial societies, technologies and lay expertise. Building on existing studies, we consider the broader ecological and social effects of water management on irrigated agriculture and cities as well as water supply and drainage, with a particular focus on India and Australasia. Although imperial ideologies of improvement impelled settlement, drove resource extraction and transformed environments, we argue that at times they also diminished the availability, quality and distribution of water. Engineering projects also benefited some groups but not others. We show that normative Anglo assumptions of productive lands and watered environments were often ill-matched with colonial ecologies and water availability, in some cases prompting anxieties about the quality and quantity of water. While these anxieties encouraged further hydrological interventions, we show that they often had unexpected and undesired consequences. We introduce the concept of ‘hydro-resilience’ to demonstrate how interventions in water management diminished the quality and quantity of water in ways that impacted unevenly on peoples and ecologies across the British Empire.

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Authors & Contributors
Jennifer L. Derr
Ballestero, Andrea
Jonathan Stafford
Isacar Bolaños
Peterson, Maya Karin
McCabe, Jane
Concepts
Imperialism
Great Britain, colonies
Colonialism
Water supply
Agriculture
Water resource management
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
18th century
17th century
Places
India
Great Britain
Europe
Ottoman Empire
Brazil
Middle and Near East
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