Water and development: the troubled economic history of the arid tropics

From the early twentieth century, a big part of the world—the arid and semi-arid tropics—began extracting, storing, and recycling vast quantities of water to sustain population growth and economic development. The idea was not a new one in this geography. It was an intrinsic part of ancient culture, statecraft, and technology. Most ancient projects, however, were local and small in scale. The capability of water extraction on a scale large enough to transform whole regions and create new cities improved in the early twentieth century, giving rise to a sharp break in the long-term population and economic growth pattern from the mid-twentieth century. Ironically, the geography of the arid tropics made transforming landscapes in this way expensive, damaging for the environment, and disputatious. The book describes this troubled history of economic emergence, building on a definition of tropicality.