How Rivers Shaped States
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I’ve talked in the past about how rivers have been crucial for human development because they:
Increase population by
Bringing water to irrigate
Carrying sediments to fertilize
Increase wealth by facilitating trade through reduced transportation costs. As we’ve seen, a reduction in transportation costs of 50% can 10x wealth in an area.
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:
They are naturally unstable because their sediments accumulate and change the shape of the river
Water speeds accelerate the change process
The result has been massive and lethal floods
To reduce these floods, humans have built embankments and dams
For fast transportation, we have often straightened rivers, increasing erosion and forcing humans to continuously dredge rivers as a result
That’s how we’ve ended up with modern rivers: straight, embanked, dredged, and with fewer natural meanders and floodplains.
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.
Rivers, Forests, States
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:
And the only trees these cities had were “industrially” produced, along roads or in dedicated spaces:
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.
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
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.
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.
This is an overlay of the French Louisiana that the US purchased in the early 1800s and the Mississippi River Basin:
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:
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.
Mesopotamia
These are Marsh Arabs:
There used to be a lot of them. They lived in the Mesopotamian marshes, in what today is Iraq:
In 1991, the Marsh Arabs participated in the uprising against Saddam Hussein, and he drained the area. Here's an example:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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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