Why read Pipe Dreams?

Book cover of Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin

Book description

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…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Pipe Dreams as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Shoshana Keller

Author

Since the 1960s Central Asia has been the center of the largest man-made water crisis in history with the drying up of the Aral Sea. Peterson’s book, based on work in Central Asian and Russian archives, provides a long-term environmental history of irrigation and its effects in the imperial and Soviet periods up to World War II. She includes a profile of the eccentric Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov, who set himself up as a local “sultan” near Tashkent, and rich material on the steep challenges that irrigation engineers faced.

From Shoshana's list on The best books on modern Central Asia.