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Day four in the Disorder symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, where we are joined by Dr Ida Danewid, who has visited with us before.
Ida is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Ida’s research interests are in anticolonial political thought, Marxism, and intellectual history. Her work has previously appeared in Third World Quarterly, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue and with the Black Mediterranean Collective.
Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau… would become an island.
In The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell writes about the history of colonialism in southern Africa and its global ripples in the present. Told as a story about three families (European, African, and Indian) and spanning three generations, the novel centers around the Zambezi river and the adjacent Kariba dam that transforms the currents of the river (its “drift”) into hydropower. Originally commissioned by the British controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) in the 1950s, the dam was built at a place well known to Dr. Livingstone and countless other colonial explorers. (As Serpell notes, “This is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or people—so it begins, of course, with a white man.”) Throughout the novel, Serpell cleverly uses the dam as a symbol of empire, enclosure, and extraction. When the book finally ends, the dam has burst and flooded its surroundings. As the great Zambezi flows freely again, Victoria Falls in more than one way.
I was reminded of Serpell’s novel when I read Joanne Yao’s breathtaking new book The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order. Straddling historical sociology, international theory, and environmental politics, Yao explores the relationship between empire and the control of nature, or what some scholars have recently termed hydrocolonialism. Focusing on the 19th century projects to domesticate three different rivers—the Rhine, Danube, and Congo—Yao examines how the mastery of wilderness was central to the rise and development of the modern/colonial world system. The dream of the ideal river, it here turns out, drifts straight through the heart of empire.
Yao’s immediate focus is on how and why this desire to domesticate the wild became such a central tenet of the imperial standard of civilization. She frames this as a story about the Enlightenment and its commitment to ideas of linear progress, order, rationality, and science. By following the river upstream, she demonstrates how European empires saw the “failure” to conquer, improve, and control nature as a sign of “barbarism” and, thus, as “being too close to nature.” Colonialism, Yao explains, unfolded as a project of eliminating “the barbarity of swampy disuse.” Over time, this mission would come to engulf the globe, ranging from “the floodplains of the Arno River… to the wetlands of the Danube delta and the megadams of the Indian subcontinent and American West.” This desire to master nature has remained a central tenet of coloniality, despite the formal end of empire. In the mid mid-20th century, many newly independent states in the global South chose to showcase their rising power and status precisely through the control of rivers and construction of megadams. Today, the quest for green and renewable energy forms part of yet another attempt to plunder and domesticate the wild.
While The Ideal River is not a book about capitalism—the word is only mentioned a handful of times in the text—it can nonetheless be productively read alongside the growing black radical and anti-colonial Marxist literature on property and racial capitalism. Thinkers such as Brenna Bhandar, Rob Nichols, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have shown how the rise and development of the capitalist world-system was premised on the racialized transformation of nature into inert objects that can be possessed, extracted, used, exploited, and sold for profit. The destruction of indigenous cosmologies and the violent imposition of private property relations were both central to this reorganization of land into extractable and tradeable objects. At the heart of this project was (and remains) a mode of possessive ownership—what Moreton-Robinson calls the “white possessive”—that renders both land and its inhabitants as disposable, extractable, and in need of improvement. Read alongside this body of scholarship, The Ideal River is perhaps first and foremost a story about how rivers were governed, enclosed, and turned into economic highways as part of the global extension of this “racial regime of ownership.” In the same way that “useless” deserts, savannahs, and forests were to be transformed into productive lands, so rivers were converted into frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries.
The most compelling aspect of Yao’s book is perhaps that, through its emphasis on the river as a lifeform (tellingly, the book is dedicated to the Rhine, Danube, and Congo), it offers an instructive framework for thinking beyond such modes of possessive ownership. As Yao and Serpell both remind us, enclosure (be it by prisons, borders, dams, pipelines, or other types of violent infrastructure) produces slow death. Like humans, the river cannot breathe when it is confined. By drifting with the river, in and out of capital’s desire to master and subjugate, Yao thus pushes us to imagine alternative ways of relating to the world around us, beyond enclosures, extraction, and bourgeois property relations: what some scholars and organisers increasingly refer to as abolition ecology. Mujeres Creando, a mestiza and Aymara anarcho-feminist group based in Bolivia, give voice to this worldmaking project on one of the many graffiti walls with which they’ve covered the urban landscape of La Paz:
the land is not the property of masters
the land is not individual property;
nor collective property;
the land is mother to all living creatures
Elsewhere, Glen Coulthard invites us to think about these antipropertarian dreams as a struggle that is “oriented around the question of land… not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of relationships… ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.” Another way to put this is to ask: What might it mean to become unpropertied and unownable? Perhaps the river can guide us here, because as Yao reminds us by reference to the water protectors at Standing Rock, water is kin: “She is alive. Nothing owns her.”
In her essay “Amniotechnics”, feminist Marxist Sophie Lewis makes a similar observation: all humans in history have been manufactured under water, in amniotic fluid. Pregnancy typically ends with the draining of water; and yet, even as we enter the unwet world where drowning remains an ever-present danger, humans remain overwhelmingly water. Lewis writes: water “is by far the greater part of us, yet with just the slightest change of proportion it will drown us; it is entirely dead, yet teeming with the life that can’t exist without it; it is far bigger than us and it is utterly inhuman.” In the messiness of life, where water is bound to flood, spill, and drift, amniotechnics emerges as a vision of radical kinship and communized care, for human and non-human life alike. “It is”, Lewis writes, “protecting water and protecting people from water”: a practice of immersion rather than mastery, and what we may usefully think of as abolition ecology. Water—or should we say the river—is life. Let the dam burst.
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The Disorder of Things is back, and with a symposium too. Over the next week we’ll feature a succession of posts on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order, followed by a rejoinder from Joanne herself (the full set of posts will be available in one easy spot here). The first post is an introduction to the book and commentaries from George Lawson. George is Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University. He is a global historical sociologist who works primarily on revolutions. His most recent books are: On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World (with Colin Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, Sharon Nepstad and Daniel Ritter) (Oxford, 2022), and Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge, 2019).
Writing from the frontline of anthropogenic climate change, in Australia, I don’t need any convincing about the co-implication of nature and politics. I live in Canberra – Australia’s ‘Bush Capital’ – a planned city in the Scottian mould, nestled amidst nature reserves, organised around an artificial lake supported by a major dam project, and home to a large number of predators, both human and otherwise. When I moved to Canberra nearly three years ago, the major (non-artificial) lake that welcomes visitors to and from Sydney, Lake George, was empty – the result of decades of low rainfall generated by human-induced climate change. Following three years of La Nina weather patterns, which has brought persistent rain that locals never tire of telling our family we brought with us from Britain, Lake George looks more like an inland sea. But not for long, it seems. Models suggest that this year will see a return to dry conditions, perhaps even a drought. So: no more Lake George.
Outside Canberra’s old Parliament House, which was replaced by a snazzy, environmentally friendly upgrade in 1988, can be found the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the oldest continuous protest site in the world. Some of the demands made by aboriginal Australian groups, including those who people the Embassy, as well as those involved in discussions around the Uluru Statement from the Heart and current debates about a First Nations Voice to Parliament, begin by acknowledging the co-implication of land, custodianship and sovereignty. Understandings of citizenship in Australia are intimately tied up with claims about the relationship between nature and political authority.
These entanglements between nature and politics are found not only in Australia, of course. As Giulia Carabelli points out in her essay in this symposium, they animate protests in North Dakota and India, have been part of legal debates in Ecuador and Bolivia, and can be found in disputes over the rights of natural objects, including rivers.
Rivers are the subject of Joanne Yao’s wonderful The Ideal River, a book that is – as each of the contributors to this symposium acknowledge – expansive in scope, richly researched and judiciously curated. But Yao’s book is not just about rivers, it is also about the wider relationship between nature and politics and, in particular, the ways in which Enlightenment understandings of science and rationality underpinned international ordering projects over the past two centuries. These projects to ‘tame nature’, Yao argues, were foundational to the construction of a standard of civilisation through which Western polities ordered relations between each other and the peoples they subjugated through imperialism and colonialism: The Rhine was the ‘internal European highway’, the Danube the ‘connecting river from Europe to the near periphery’, and the Congo ‘the imperial river of commerce’. Enlightenment principles of mastery over nature were tied to scientific techniques and ideas of progress in projects that stratified peoples and places around the world. In this way, rivers serve as the elemental source of global governance. For Yao, the taming of nature is a distinctly modern project, one bound up with ideas of mastery and ordering, power and civilisation, rationality and progress.
If rivers and forums of global governance are conjoined twins of the Enlightenment, one modern family member that receives less attention in The Ideal River is capitalism. As Ida Danewid points out in her essay, and as Yao recognises in her response, rivers were imagined as ‘frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries’. Despite noting the commercial features of hydro-ordering, and their necessarily extractive, dispossessive properties, capitalism plays a muted role in Yao’s narrative. Sorting peoples into civilized and uncivilized quotients had many dimensions: racial, religious, and more. But a crucial element concerned levels of ‘development’. In Australia, for example, claims of aboriginal sovereignty were often denied on the basis that aboriginal nations were insufficiently ‘developed’ – in other words, they did not support individual property rights or sufficiently ‘advanced’ commercial practices. Here, as in other parts of the world, the standard of civilisation was organised, in significant measure, through capitalist logics – and egregiously misapplied to experiences on the ground in order to dispossess and subjugate First Nations peoples.
A further issue raised by Yao’s interlocutors arises from her interest in the distinctly modern co-location of science, nature and political authority. To contemporary eyes, Wittfogel’s notion of ‘hydraulic empires’ contains deeply problematic Eurocentric associations with ‘oriental despotism’. And rightly so. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the age-old harnessing of water for political claims-making, and the development of scientific advances to do so. No doubt these dynamics have taken novel forms in modernity. But the binding together of science, nature, polity formation and extraction is a long-running entanglement. This raises a linked question about whether the modern standard of civilisation itself changed over time. I wonder whether the ordering of the Rhine in the early part of the 19th century was as severe as the ordering of the Danube in mid-century and, even more so, the Congo in the 1880s? During the course of the century, as modern capitalism became more extensive and ideas of ‘scientific’ racism hardened, so global hierarchies themselves shifted. Not all ordering projects sorted peoples with the same intensity or through the same logics. And not all wildernesses were considered to be equally wild.
The relationship between imaginaries and political projects forms the basis for Cameron Harrington’s contribution to the symposium. Harrington raises the question of why the ‘endless creative potential of the imagination’ became ‘narrowly expressed’ in particular political projects. After all, there was not one ‘modern imaginary’. As Ida Birkvad persuasively argues in her essay, not only was the Enlightenment not a single thing, but modernity also reconfigured a brand of romanticism that venerated nature. In this sense, ‘the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality’. Today, the sanctification of nature is often associated with protest movements, particularly those by indigenous peoples. Yet, as Birkvad notes, the romanticisation of the past can itself be a political project that maintains and reinforces existing hierarchies and exclusions. Here anti-developmentalism stands as a form of, rather than in opposition to, ordering projects that meld science, nature and political authority.
This speaks to a more complex association between nature and politics than is sometimes apparent. In her essay, Kiran Phull captures this complexity through the notion of the ‘braided river’ – an assemblage of interweaving waterways that ‘split, stray, and merge in ever-shifting ways’ and, in the process, generate a ‘plaited pattern’. This unruly, yet patterned, formation is one that resonates with contemporary concerns over the entanglement of nature and politics, constituted as it is through a complex, multi-scalar tapestry of the global, the transnational, the regional, the national, and the local. Contemporary global governance too is a dense web of overlapping administrative forums. One of the achievements of Yao’s book is to see this dense web as bound up with hydraulic infrastructures. This leaves open the question of what political projects will emerge from the various, often contradictory, imaginaries that bind together science, nature and international politics. Far from occupying spaces of ‘technocratic dullness’, Yao points – quite rightly – to their ‘poetry and imaginaries that animate our dreams and nightmares of the future’. What would happen, she asks, if we stop to ‘listen, observe, and learn from the infinite varieties of collective solidarities that have always already populated the international without a desire to fix, control, and master’? What indeed …
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