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Abstract

Blood and Water is one of the most substantive surveys of the reciprocity between the development of irrigational infrastructure of the River Indus Basin and socio-political character of the authorities that govern it. Focusing on modern history generally, David Gilmartin traces the development of human engineering in the Indus River Basin from the Baloch agriculturalists developments of rodkohi (torrential) irrigational systems to the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 which split the river amongst two new nation states, which themselves were questioning the conception of a divided river. His work serves to prove that the River Indus Basin’s political ecology gradually shifted from the rhetoric of the river as ‘natural’ to that of the Indus as ‘engineered’ but each chapter masterfully circumvents essentialism by demonstrating the technological innovations in the ‘natural’ earlier developments of the Baloch agriculturalists to the ‘natural’ limitations on the technological largesse of the British dam and canal projects.