The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire Across China, India, and Southeast Asia with Iftekhar Iqbal (Stanford UP, 2025)

Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies · New Books Network

Opublikowano: 2026-10-01

Six great Asian river systems have their origins in the Tibetan glacial region: the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Red and the Yangtse ('BISMRY'). Together they comprise the largest concentration of fresh water on the planet outside of the polar regions, and they support one third of humanity. In the age of imperialism, Western colonial powers dreamed of harnessing the economic potential of these great rivers, as if an ‘empire of men’ challenged a much older ‘empire of rivers’. This is the theme of Iftekhar Iqbal’s conceptually ambitious new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine...