Water and Development: The Troubled Economic History of the Arid Tropics

From the early twentieth century, a big part of the world—the arid tropics—began extracting, storing, and recycling vast quantities of water to sustain population growth and economic development. These regions worked on water to deal with seasonality, or the rotation between extreme aridity for a part of the year and a concentrated period of rain. The idea of storing water in the wet season to use it in the dry season was not a new one in this geography. Indeed, it was an intrinsic part of ...