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During the twentieth century, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers underwent a profound physical transformation, one that mirrored the region's political shift from imperial rule to nation-state. Here, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey took shape in the wake of the Ottoman Empire, and the two rivers became sites of economic development planning and large-scale environmental engineering. It is a modern conceit that industrial, technological societies transcend ecological change, that technology and ecology operate separately. With this book, Dale J. Stahl instead centers riverine ecologies within the context of social and political projects and shows how natural processes encounter human intentions to manage, control, or modernize.
Weaving imperial and national histories with ecological ones, Two Rivers Entangled undermines familiar accounts of the invention of states, the advance of nations, and the triumphs of technical expertise. Stahl entangles a wide range of human and nonhuman actors—knitting together the movement of engineers and bureaucrats with that of salt particles, linking the disappointment of revolutionaries to the dissolution of unreliable rock, and following the flow of water over embankments and into poetry. Ultimately, this book offers an alternative account of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history, one subject as much to ecological change as to human visions and intentions.
"Two Rivers Entangled offers a far-reaching exploration of how the societies and biophysical systems of the Tigris-Euphrates are deeply bound together in conceptual, ideological, and material ways. This history of 'modern' rivers makes a superb meditation on complex biophysical, technical, and human networks and how these entanglements come into being." —Christopher Sneddon, Dartmouth College
"Dale Stahl reimagines the history of Iraq and its wider region by placing at its center the two rivers from which the country was formed. The work of statesmen, armies, engineers, and poets tangled with riverine forces, he shows, and was entangled by them. An impressive retelling of the making of modern Iraq." —Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University
"Two Rivers Entangled is at its most engaging when it goes beyond the techno-ecological environments themselves to examine past imaginaries of the future, especially in Stahl's reading of engineering reports and geological studies as subjective poetic projections alongside more traditionally accepted artistic productions of poems, films, paintings, and architecture. In this, he shows that just as the projects themselves, their environments, and the various riverine human and non-human actants entangled, so too did more strictly human methods of interaction and meaning-making." —Nicholas Ostrum, GlobalEurope
Map of the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin
Introduction: Rivers and the New Materialism
1. Water
2. Salt
3. Rock
4. Reservoir
Conclusion: Regeneration and a New Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index