Oriental Despotism 169a. Large-scale preparatory operations (Purpose: irrigation)
The combined agricultural activities of an irrigation farmer are comparable to the
combined agricultural activities of a rainfall farmer. But the operations of the
former include types of labour (on-the-spot ditching, damming and watering) that
are absent in the operations of the latter. The magnitude of this special type of
labour can be judged from the fact that in a Chinese village a peasant may spend
from 20 to over 50 per cent of his work time irrigating, and that in many Indian
villages irrigation is the most time-consuming single item in the farmer’s budget.^3
Hydroagriculture (small-scale irrigation farming) involves a high intensity of
cultivation on irrigated fields – and often also on non-irrigated fields.^4 But it does
not involve a division of labour on a communal, territorial or national level. Such
a work pattern occurs only when large quantities of water have to be manipulated.
Wherever, in pre-industrial civilizations, man gathered, stored and conducted
water on a large scale, we find the conspicuous division between preparatory (feed-
ing) and ultimate labour characteristic of all hydraulic agriculture.
b. Large-scale protective operations (Purpose: flood control)
But the fight against the disastrous consequences of too little water may involve a
fight against the disastrous consequences of too much water. The potentially most
rewarding areas of hydraulic farming are arid and semi-arid plains and humid
regions suitable for aquatic crops, such as rice, that are sufficiently low-lying to
permit watering from nearby rivers. These rivers usually have their sources in
remote mountains, and they rise substantially as the summer sun melts part of the
snow accumulated there.
Upstream developments of this kind cause annual inundations in Egypt, Mes-
opotamia, Turkestan, India, China and in the Andean and Mexican zones of
America. In semi-arid areas on-the-spot rains create additional dangers when they
are overconcentrated (convectional) or irregular. This condition prevails in North
China, northern Mesopotamia (Assyria) and the Mexican lake region. Thus a
hydraulic community that resorts to preparatory labour to safeguard the produc-
tive use of water may also have to resort to protective labour to safeguard its crops
from periodic and excessive inundations.
When, in protohistorical times, the Chinese began to cultivate the great plains of
North China, they quickly recognized that the centres of greatest potential fertility
were also the centres of greatest potential destruction. To quote John Lossing Buck:
‘Geologically speaking, man has settled these plains thousands of years before they
were ready for occupation.’^5 The Chinese built huge embankments which, although
unable to remove entirely the risk inhering in the ambivalent situation, matched and
even surpassed in magnitude the area’s preparatory (feeding) works.^6
In India enormous problems of flood control are posed by the Indus River^7
and, in a particularly one-sided way, by the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers,
which in Bengal create optimal conditions for the cultivation of rice and maximal
dangers from floods. By 1900 Bengal boasted 97 miles of larger irrigation canals
and 1298 miles of embankments.^8