Pipe Dreams Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin Studies in Environment and History Series

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.

Maya K. Peterson was the Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.