How Rivers Shaped States

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Tomas Pueyo September 24, 2024

I am doing a new cohort of my course, Business Communication and Storytelling, starting

I’ve talked in the past about how rivers have been crucial for human development
because they:

1. Increase population by

1. Bringing water to irrigate

2. Carrying sediments to fertilize

2. Increase wealth by facilitating trade through reduced transportation costs. As we’ve

3. As a result, most successful cities have sprung up around rivers, and the most
successful of them all were at river confluences or at their mouths, as they could
become market nodes.

In the last couple of articles, we’ve learned a few more aspects about rivers:

4. They are naturally unstable because their sediments accumulate and change the
shape of the river

5. Water speeds accelerate the change process

6. The result has been massive and lethal floods

7. To reduce these floods, humans have built embankments and dams

8. For fast transportation, we have often straightened rivers, increasing erosion and
forcing humans to continuously dredge rivers as a result

9. That’s how we’ve ended up with modern rivers: straight, embanked, dredged, and
with fewer natural meanders and floodplains.

10. Rivers also work as boundaries between states, like the US and Mexico. The main
reason is that they’re easy to navigate, but hard to cross.

But there are other ways in which rivers have affected humans. That’s what we’re going
to discover today.

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What was the main building material in the past? Wood.

But wood is heavy, so it’s expensive to transport. As a result, people tended to cut it
where it was closest. That meant generally close to their village or city. That’s how we end
up with cities without forests around them:

Seville, Spain

And the only trees these cities had were “industrially” produced, along roads or in
dedicated spaces:

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 From A Connected Place: These trees are pollarded, meaning that the top and side branches have
been cut off to encourage growing upwards. This has the advantage of being harder for animals to eat,
and easier for humans to pick.

Once the city’s surroundings are empty of trees, what’s the next place people will go to
get wood? Along the river, since it’s the cheapest way to transport the wood—especially
since it’s heavy but floats. This was especially true upriver: People would cut trees there
for timber and float them downstream.

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 Pattern of upstream deforestation from a hypothetical state center. Source: James
C Scott, Against the Grain.

Of course, if you cut trees upstream along the river, what do you get? First, more floods.

Notice how upstream there’s a “forest” that keeps the sand fixed but also absorbs lots of
water of each flood. Downstream, there are no trees, so the river moves radically,
bringing soil with it, and creating very wide floodplains

And second, more erosion, so more sediments deposit in the channel, so the riverbed
rises (and you get more floods again). Sometimes, the water level would rise higher than
the surrounding farmland, as we saw with the Yellow River example, so people needed to
build dikes, which would reduce flood frequency but increase their destructiveness.

The result is that farmers needed to coordinate to build the dikes and manage floods, and
this frequently led to the formation of a governing body. This is one of the primary ways
that governments emerged. For example, we have seen that the Egyptian government is
so ancient and centralized because of the Nile. The same can be said of the Aztecs and
Lake Texcoco.

Colonial Expansion

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A stark example of rivers facilitating the growth of states along their path is colonialism.

In the early 19th century, foreigners led by the British and the Americans cannoned their
way into Chinese rivers seeking control of the country. They took over the mouths of
some rivers—like Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River, or Shanghai on the Yangtze
—and patrolled them like they were their backyard. They used this power to put down
local rebellions and force the opium trade upriver, making fortunes as the country
decayed.

The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis (right), destroying the Chinese war junks at the
mouth of the Pearl River in 1841, during the First Opium War (1839-42). Source.

In the late 19th century, explorer Henry Morton Stanley navigated Africa’s Congo River on
behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium. Between 1874 and 1877, Stanley charted the river's
course, proving it was navigable and connected to the Atlantic Ocean, and allowing King
Leopold II to claim the vast Congo Basin under the guise of humanitarian efforts and free
trade.

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 Routes of Stanley's expeditions in Central Africa. Source.

This is an overlay of the French Louisiana that the US purchased in the early 1800s and
the Mississippi River Basin:

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 Pink: French Louisiana. Highlighted tree-like structure: Mississippi River Basin. Green: Part of the
Mississippi River Basin that was not part of French Louisiana. As you can see, French Louisiana was
basically defined as the entire Mississippi Basin west of the Mississippi River itself.

Other examples include the Niger River for French expansion in western Africa, the
Hudson River for Dutch and British expansion in America, the Nile for Egyptian
colonization (and later British), the Volga for Russian colonization, the Ganges for British
rule, the Mekong River for French Indochina…

Blind State
This was not the case in river deltas. Imagine that you live here:

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 Yours is the pink house in the middle of the Amazon Delta

No matter where the colonizing state might have a strong presence, how many times
does it need to cross rivers to get to you? Even if the state is well equipped to navigate
the river, it must still find the right village at the right place, get there, and find the
remaining people. Difficult.

Here’s an ever starker way to see the problem: the delta of the Lena River in Russia.

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 How is the state supposed to navigate this?! Source.

Mesopotamia

These are Marsh Arabs:

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 Source

There used to be a lot of them. They lived in the Mesopotamian marshes, in what today is
Iraq:

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 Pink patches are the marshes. Source.

In 1991, the Marsh Arabs participated in the uprising against Saddam Hussein, and he
drained the area. Here's an example:

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 Satellite image of the Mesopotamian Marshes, 2000–2009. Source.

But that’s just because technology had advanced enough to make this possible and
affordable for a state like Iraq. For most of history, this approach wasn’t viable, so these
marshes were perfect for hiding. And people did hide there for centuries.

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Burma’s Irrawaddy

When I traveled to Burma, it was faster to go from Yangon to Mandalay than to the
Irrawaddy Delta:

In the Irrawaddy Delta, moving north to south was reasonably easy, but east to west was
a nightmare. In other words, states find it difficult to project power into marshy swampy
deltas because tributaries run in a certain direction, and it’s hard to travel perpendicular to
them.

This is why, historically, delta areas have had more diversity of tongues and cultures,
weaker states, and less access for police. People go there to escape state oppression.

Vietnam

You can see on this map the Irrawaddy River, as well as the other big rivers of Indochina:

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If you think about it, the fact that Vietnam is made of two river deltas connected by a thin
strip of coastal mountains makes it a very weird country:

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It’s a thin country built of a long mountain range that connects two river plains, those of
the Red and Mekong rivers. How this ended up as a single country is a story for another
time, but you can imagine how different these two regions would be.

The Mekong, to the south, meanders on a very flat plain for a very long distance, with
plenty of floodplain upstream to absorb any big floods. That makes its delta, to the south,
quiet and easy to navigate, without too much silting, and with predictable and gentle
floodplain flooding. There was no need for heavy works, so a strong local state didn’t
emerge. This was also a region more connected to global trade, so more cosmopolitan
and open-minded.

You can guess from the map that it’s nothing like what happens in the Red River up north.
The Red River has a much shorter run to the sea, thus a steeper gradient, with few
meandering floodplains upstream. That has resulted in relatively unpredictable and
violent flooding, which requires extensive diking, and hence coordination: taxes to finance
the works, and mandatory contributions of work by everyone.

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But the dikes sometimes ruptured, causing not only the immediate death of the few
submerged, but even worse: food crises that could kill orders of magnitude more. In this
type of situation, you want insurance so that if your field is destroyed, maybe your
neighbors can share their harvest with you this time, and you’ll get their back next time.
So there were insular, hierarchical villages holding some land communally for risk
reduction.

It’s therefore not a coincidence that the capital of Vietnam is at the head of the Red River
delta (Hanoi) since a stronger state was born there, while the trade capital of the country
(Ho Chi Minh City, earlier called Saigon) is in the Mekong River delta. It’s also not a
coincidence that, until very recently, Ho Chi Minh City was richer than Hanoi both in GDP
and per capita.

It’s even further not a coincidence that the south’s combination of agricultural wealth,
exposure to international trade, and less centralized control made it more receptive to
capitalist ideals. In the north, the existing centralized structures and emphasis on
collective effort, as well as the geographical proximity to China and its ideas of centralized
governance and collective societal structures, provided fertile ground for communist
ideology to take root.

Legibility
I left the best for last. This will blow your mind: This is how the history of rivers can tell us
how to vote today.

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