Corey Ross: Liquid Empire – Water and Power in the Colonial World |

Описание: In "Liquid Empire", Corey Ross tells the story of how waters in the colonial world have shaped the history of colonialism – and how this imperial past still haunts us today. He presented and discussed his publication at our GlobeColloquium with Nadin Heé and Daniel Hedinger (ReCentGlobe).

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.

Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.


Corey Ross is director of the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel. His principal areas of research are imperialism and global environmental history in the 19th-20th centuries – or, what one might call the socio-environmental history of Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world. Previous projects include “Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire” (2017), Oxford University Press.