Water History is World History

Introduction: Water History is World History
Tjerje Tvedt & Eva Jacobsson

The text reflects on the control over water in history and the changed relation human and environment in history.

Water control is as old as human society and man has tried to master nature by transforming and controlling water and using it as a source of power.
The authors use the distinction of 3 temporalities in water control based on Braudel:
The événementielle: short-lived dramatic events (large water projects)
Conjoncures: cyclical processes (planning traditions)
La longe durée: historical waves of great length.
The authors stress it is important that water history cuts across these temporalities because when it comes to water, events may have a broader long-term, irreversible impact on both nature and on society.
The prospect of climate change will make water control an even more pressing issue across the world.
Therefore the era of large-scale water control projects is probably not over. They give the example of China and Libie where the exploitation of modern water transfer technology is driven to its maximum.

The text examines the role of water in history and development in the traditions within the social sciences the last 200-year. Historians and other social scientists have long been reluctant to analyse relationships between water landscape and social organization. Historical development has been regarded as a process by which mankind is liberated from nature or from the powers of nature. The separation of nature from society was one prerequisite for regarding nature instrumentally, as a set of passive objects to be exploited.
Within the idea of modernity nature and water landscape was relegated.
According to the authors Karl Wittfogel was the first to developed a theory of history that gave nature a central place within a broad framework of development-orientated, historical materialism, which aroused much criticism.

In the 1990s environmental concern and development pessimism brought about a dissolving of the dichotomy of culture and nature. Historians stressed on how humans negatively affected the vulnerable waterscape and how control over rivers meant power of some people over others. The text compares Richard White’s and Blaine Hardens writing on the Columbia River. To Harden the river is transformed to a man-made machine while White considers the river as an organic machine. He argues by stressing canals and dams are part of the river one can maintain that there is no border between man and nature. According to the authors water is both an actor in its own right but this reality cannot be accessed except through cultural and social lenses. They argue it is important to study both the unnatural and natural history of water disasters.
And they stress on the importance of water control and water management to be based on historical, concrete, empirical knowledge to meet the challenges facing societies in the future. Despite all the differences in time and amongst societies water control is one thing which all people at all times have, had and will always have in common.