Pipe Dreams: Water, Technology, and the Remaking of Central Asia in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union

Maya Peterson
History
UC Santa Cruz

Pipe Dreams: Water, Technology, and the Remaking of Central Asia in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union is a sociopolitical history of Central Asia under tsarist and Soviet rule that uses an environmental historical approach. The book uses water as a means through which to understand both the continuities and ruptures between tsarist and Bolshevik visions for the transformation of Central Asia into a colony of the Russian and Soviet empires. Water was not only essential to the cotton-growing and colonization schemes that would make Central Asia profitable, but the ability to control water came to symbolize the legitimacy of Russian and Soviet rule in the region. Water management remains a key issue in Central Asia today, yet its importance in the history of the region has received little attention in any language. By looking at Central Asia within a larger geographical scope, and by taking seriously the environmental context of the Russian and Soviet rule of Central Asia, Pipe Dreams represents an important contribution to the fields of modern Russian history and the history of central Eurasia, as well as environmental history, the history of science and technology, and the comparative study of empires in the modern period.