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  • Published: 3 December 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141982649
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

Unruly Waters

How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia's History




A bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters

Asia's history has been shaped by its waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas - and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations.

Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only Asia's past and its future.

  • Published: 3 December 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141982649
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

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Praise for Unruly Waters

There is no disappointment here. Sunil Amrith consolidates his reputation for intellectual sophistication, a good historian's sensitivity to detail and a flare for large-scale tale-telling that produces work as page-turning as a novel... He handles the big questions fearlessly and elegantly, deploying oral history, a variety of archives and private collections and a properly global understanding...Read this book for information, for convincing analytic nuance, as a humbling shake-up of one's worldview, and as a series of heart-stopping tales.

Praise for CROSSING THE BAY OF BENGAL: Caroline Osella, Times Higher Education

In refocusing on the Bay and restoring a Braudelian sweep to its history, this nicely written and meticulously researched study could prove as timely as it is instructive.

Praise for CROSSING THE BAY OF BENGAL: John Keay, Literary Review