The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire Across China, India, and Southeast Asia

Iqbal, a historian, demonstrates that rivers are more than just geographical features. They are powerful agents of history and geopolitics. In this innovative book, he focuses on six such rivers—the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red, and Yangtze—each of which originates in the Tibetan Plateau. Iqbal argues that these rivers produced distinct and rich cultures. In the nineteenth century, they fostered intense imperial competition. The late Qing state sought to extend its authority into southwestern China by trying to govern shipping traffic on these waterways. The British tried to control large stretches of the rivers by annexing Assam and fighting for much of Myanmar, which would allow London to govern trade between the latter territory and China. The many ethnic communities spread across these river basins did not simply submit to these empires, and some of them succeeded in remaining independent. But modern nation-states have been broadly successful at making rivers their instruments. Both China and India, for instance, turned rivers into borders by damming flows and restricting navigation across what had once been a shared watery world.