Pipe Dreams

By Maya K. Peterson,

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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Why read it?

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

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 modern Central Asia.

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