Water and Development

The Troubled Economic History of the Arid Tropics

Tirthankar Roy (Professor, Professor, London School of Economics)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
19 August 2025

Environmental economics; Economic history; The environment

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 ancient culture, statecraft, and technology. Most ancient projects, however, were local and small in scale. The capability of water extraction on a scale large enough to transform whole regions and create new cities improved in the early twentieth century. The process gave rise to a sharp break in the long-term population and economic growth pattern from the mid-twentieth century.

The world knows that rapid economic growth must take a toll on the environment. The tropics were no exception. However, the economic emergence of the arid tropics reinforces the message differently from how climate activists imagine. The geography of the arid tropics makes transforming landscapes to extract and recycle large quantities of water damaging to the environment and disputatious. The book is about that troubled history of economic emergence.

By: Tirthankar Roy (Professor Professor London School of Economics)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 155mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9780197802397
ISBN 10: 0197802397
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 19 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Tirthankar Roy is a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. He has published extensively on the history and development of South Asia, global history, empires, and environmental history, and is the author of Monsoon Economies: India's History in a Changing Climate (2022), Law and the Economy in Colonial India (with Anand Swamy, 2016), and Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy (with Anand Swamy).