Liquid empire water and power in the colonial world

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World



A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water


In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas.
Liquid Empire
tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order



Ross, Corey
.
Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World
. : Princeton University Press, 2024. 464 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691211442.


Reviewed by
Heesoo Cho (Davidson College)

Published on
H-Oceans (July, 2025)

Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)



Printable Version:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61798

Water is ubiquitous and yet so coveted. It covers more than 70 percent of our planet’s surface and forms up to 60 percent of the human adult body. A great deal of human history has developed around and been shaped by the exploration, management, and manipulation of water, and we are now embarking on a new chapter of this cycle in the twenty-first century as we venture into outer space. Unsurprisingly, water has become a source and object of power. Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of Europe’s modern empires and the hydraulic projects in the colonial world. Corey Ross’s
Liquid Empire
: Water and Power in the Colonial World

tells one part of this story through examining a variety of water management programs carried out by European empires in colonial Southeast Asia and Africa in the

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World - Hardcover


Liquid Empire (Hardcover)

Corey Ross


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Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water.In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world's most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vivid

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Hardcover)



A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world's most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas.
Liquid Empire
tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities--but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.