Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History
Sunil Amrith
Basic Books: 2018
.
There’s an old story (with many variations) about a security guard posted at a construction site, who day after day watched a worker leave the site after his shift pushing a wheelbarrow lightly loaded with used coffee cups, scrap packaging, a bit of construction debris and dirt. After a few weeks of this, the guard sidled up to the worker outside the wire-mesh fencing surrounding the site and said: “Look, every day I’ve been watching you leave at quitting time pushing that wheelbarrow carrying nothing but junk. I know you’ve got some kind of scam going, but can’t figure it out. Between you and me, what are you stealing?” The worker tersely replied: “Wheelbarrows.”

This story came to mind in reading Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith’s ambitious and absorbing study on the importance of water in shaping Asia’s past, enabling its present and threatening its future. Despite the centrality of rains, rivers, coasts and seas in the region, water — hiding in plain sight, as it were — until relatively recently has received little sustained attention from scholars, who have more or less taken it for granted or subsumed its consideration under other topics, agriculture, most notably. It is unlikely that scholars or anyone else will do either of these things again, for among Amrith’s many accomplishments is to make crystal clear the case for water’s importance.

In making his case, Amrith, who teaches history at Harvard, joins a talented cohort of scholars in the process of reconstructing the environmental history of Asia and its constituent parts. Continuing and extending the work done by pioneering figures such as John Richards, Michael Adas, Peter Boomgaard, Richard Grove and Mike Davis, this cohort has taken environmental history from the fringes of historical scholarship to the very centre of the field — none too soon either, given the huge environmental problems we face and the uncertainties as we move deeper into the Anthropocene.

Although one of the principal themes of Amrith’s approach is to extend, at times even to dissolve, borders and boundaries when studying water, Unruly Waters generally operates within narrower spatial limits than the book’s subtitle suggests. To be sure, the book treats issues and covers themes relevant to the whole of Asia, but it is rather more a close study of the history of water in South Asia, punctuated at appropriate points by instructive comparisons from China. The author’s more restricted remit is hardly debilitating — indeed, it might actually make Unruly Waters more valuable — as it allows Amrith to dive more deeply into a plethora of issues that resonate to varying degrees from the Red Sea to the Sea of Sakhalin.

• Tags: Issue 18, Peter A. Coclanis, Sunil Amrith