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Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Donald Worster’s book Rivers of Empire posits the idea of water as the currency of the American West, foregrounding control of water resources as the story that gave form to the region’s geographic, social, and economical development. Worster’s argument is that the American West is not the center of individualism that it is made out to be, but is a hydraulic society, dependent for its current existence on the ability of a complex and expensive network of irrigation systems for its production, and thus dependent upon the capital and the authority by which those irrigation systems were built and are maintained. In many ways, this type of society was similar to that of ancient Chinese civilization, which had based its success on the efficient use and control of water. China organized its social hierarchy around agriculture, which in turn was organized around the efficient use of water through the building of irrigation systems. Karl von Wittfogel called this a “hydraulic society,” and included Mesopotamia, Persia, and pre-Columbian America among the hydraulic civilizations. These ancient civilizations, though, developed as hydraulic societies from a need to feed growing populations, whereas the people of the American West migrated there not out of necessity, but due to boosterism, and for economic and social reasons. Beginning with surveyors in the 1840’s, Americans saw the West in two ways. Either the desert was an alien beauty, to be taken on its own terms or it was an abomination that required human development. Eventually the latter view won out, and developing the desert led to a long series of experiments with irrigation schemes and water rights.

The Mormon Church in Utah established a hydraulic a hydraulic society and the church itself held authority over rights to water in Mormon controlled territory. In Colorado, two legal doctrines regarding water rights developed in opposition to each other – the right of prior appropriation mixed with a corporatist system within which groups managed water by appointing a mutually recognized central authority. California developed a combination of legal doctrines in which large ranchers claimed control of whole rivers simply by owning the land on the banks, but smaller farmers depended for their water upon irrigation created by government authorities or by real-estate developers. In all three cases, conflicts between big ranchers and smaller farmers, and the involvement of government in surveying and building irrigation systems obscured the needs of individuals for the simple reason that no individual could manage to build or maintain irrigation systems alone. Farmers and ranchers alike required vast resources to build thousands of miles of canals and ditches, and so they established associations of private capital, and these wrestled with each other for control of water. As control of the canals also led to control of the wealth of the West, a new class hierarchy was built along with the building of the canals, and abetted by the federal government, whose financing and engineering made the canals possible. The actual builders of the canals and ditches were not the owners of the land that received benefit from the irrigation systems, however. Instead, the hydraulic society of the West was built on the backs of laborers who had no say in where or how the canals were built.

The development of diverse systems of water rights management was important in two ways. It demonstrated the difficulty in sharing inadequate water resources and it encouraged the United States government to step in as a central authority in water issues in order to protect the development of farming. Thus federal regulations tended to favor large concentrations of land over small, and economic development over the needs of the natural environment or of individuals. This solidified the class and economic divisions of the West, and made it less, not more, individualistic in its social structure. As the differing laws regarding water rights in different states began to come into conflict with each other at the turn of the Twentieth Century. California’s production capacity, and its close connection to national markets through railroads made it too big to deprive of water. Other states began to have to defer to California’s needs in a developing national hierarchy in water management. The greater need for water by arid California presented a a water trap to the nation as a whole – population and economic growth required development of California, and to a lesser extent other hydraulic states of the West, which required continued appropriation of water by the government and private interests for commercial purposes. Water came in the West to have the same importance that capital had in Marx’s analysis. Control of water meant wealth and power, while lack of control meant relegation to the lower classes, struggle for existence, and a lack of individual choice. The West is not a world of rugged individuals, then but a constructed space built around engineered irrigation resources for purposes of profit-making.

Lawrence Rakestraw, the late environmental historian from the Pacific Northwest, was very critical of Worster’s work, saying that the book covers California and Arizona, with only minimal attention paid to the rest of the Western states, and that it concentrates primarily on five major river systems, almost all of which are in California, leaving out or barely mentioning major systems such as that of the Columbia river. Rakestraw saw Rivers of Empire as little more than an attempt to turn Wittfogel and Marx into environmentalists. While I do think the book was more limited than its title leads a reader to believe, and certainly has a political point of view, I do not share Rakestraw’s sense that this book has little to redeem it. Rather, it needs to be read in a larger context of books about the West.