 |
| |
| "The Triumph of Water", lecture at the University of Nancy, 1879 |
|
|
|
History is, one might say, somewhat waterlogged. Since water is absolutely
essential to human life, it should not be surprising that it is an important
component of human history. Yet it is surprising how little attention water
receives in historical accounts.
Humans have generally settled near convenient sources of water. Most of the
great ancient civilizations depended on a particular source of water. For
example, the Egyptians centered their civilization on the Nile. Mesopotamia
(Greek for the land between the rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates) was the
home of several important ancient empires. Chinese civilization was located
principally in the Yellow and Yangzi river basins. In the case of these great
civilizations, there usually is considerable discussion of water as a
fundamental aspect of the civilization in question.
Water facilitated relatively rapid transportation prior to about 1850 C.E. In
the era of exploration and discovery from the late 15th through the 18th
centuries, Europeans explored all the major oceans and seas. Water was also
thought to be an essential aspect of imperialism from the 16th century on (this
is known the "salt water fallacy," the idea that an empire must be separated
from the mother country by an ocean; this is why neither the Russian nor the
American continental empires were seen as comparable to the Spanish, Portuguese,
British, French, and Dutch empires). The history of exploration and trade
remains a major area of historical scholarship dealing with water.
Some of the most innovative scholarship concerns the way in which a body of
water ties together what might otherwise be disparate areas and provides the
backbone for a common culture. The great example of this approach is Ferdinand
Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip the
Second, 2 volumes (1972, 1973). A recent example, shorter and less scholarly but
highly readable, is Neal Ascherson, Black Sea, 1995.
Water was also an important source of power in the period before the Industrial
Revolution. Even though steam power made water power less necessary, water
remained an essential component in all kinds of manufacturing processes.
Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, however, water increasingly becomes a
hidden factor in human history. For many, it quite literally went underground,
hidden from sight until one turned on a faucet or flushed a toilet. Increasing,
there was a tendency to view it as something to master and control. This is, of
course, in accord with a more general approach to nature as a whole: mastery and
control.
Anyone contemplating the rubric "Water in History" is faced with a sea of
possible topics. I will be looking at two in particular. One, the improvement of
water supplies and waste water removal in French cities at the end of the 19th
century, illustrates humanity's capacity for using water to improve the material
conditions of life. The other, Soviet efforts to construct canals and dams as
part of the Five-Year Plans of the 1930s, mostly illustrates the follies humans
commit in their attempts to master and control water. Between the two, we should
get some insights into present-day dilemmas concerning the use of water in
industrial societies.
Last updated
01/10/2003 21.09
|
