Irrigation and despotisms

Here’s a review I wrote for Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotisms.

Hydraulic economies (Those based on huge water projects, either irrigation or flood control) require large corvees of labor, generally require autocrats to organize them, and morph into monumental constructions and armies. Farming tends to be high intensity and productive; peasants often have control over their own farming practices, but little else. Intensive agriculture allows very high productivity (per acre), so creates high populations. The state, originally managed (save in conquest situations) by the technical elite, demands total subservience. (Exceptions featuring cooperative, not forced, labor, and hence non-totalitarian societies are Venice, Salt Lake City and the Netherlands.)

Most land is rented or allocated by government or by (usually palace connected) landholders; peasant ownership occasionally occurs. Hydraulic Despotism would be a better title (and was the author’s original choice, but the publisher apparently thought “Oriental” would sell better): examples include Central America, the Pueblos, Spain under the Muslims, and Hawaii, in addition to the expected Egypt, India, the near east and China. Despotisms are often exported sans hydrology, as in Rome (via Sicily), Russia, the Byzantine Balkans.

Which leads me to a suggestion from elsewhere, that the US might well have emerged as a totalitarian state rather than as a liberal democracy had we been settled from west to east, rather than the reverse.  Much of the west requires large irrigation projects to support population; little of the east does.