Pipe Dreams
Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin

A long environmental history of the Aral Sea region, focusing on colonization and development in Russian and Soviet Central Asia.

Maya K. Peterson (Author)

9781108475471, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 May 2019

416 pages, 18 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.74 kg

'Peterson draws her vast research in Russian-language sources into a surprisingly fast-paced, multifaceted, and enjoyably readable volume. Her close attention to specific plans for irrigation networks is balanced with a critical and rigorous discussion of Russian and Soviet colonialism as manifested in visions for making the desert bloom … Maya Peterson's untimely death in 2021 leaves environmental history with a brilliant, if too brief, legacy.' Marianne Kamp, Technology and Culture

The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from 'wasteland' into productive agricultural land. Though ostensibly about bringing modernity, progress, and prosperity to the deserts, the transformation of Central Asia's landscapes through tsarist- and Soviet-era hydraulic projects bore the hallmarks of a colonial experiment. Examining how both regimes used irrigation-age fantasies of bringing the deserts to life as a means of claiming legitimacy in Central Asia, Maya K. Peterson brings a fresh perspective to the history of Russia's conquest and rule of Central Asia.

Introduction
1. The land beyond the rivers: Russians on the Amu and Syr Darya
2. Eastern Eden: irrigation and empire on the Hungry steppe
3. To create a new Turkestan: water governance in the irrigation age
4. The land of bread and honey? Settlement and subversion in the land of seven rivers
5. Sundering the chains of nature: Bolshevik visions for Central Asia
6. From shockwork to people's construction: socialist labor on Stalin's Canals
Epilogue: the fate of the Aral Sea
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], European history [HBJD]