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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Brendan Haug, "Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
Description: Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm (University of Michigan Press, 2024) is the first environmental history of Egypt’s Fayyūm depression. The book examines human relationships with flowing water from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. Until the arrival of modern perennial irrigation in the nineteenth century, the Fayyūm was the only region of premodern Egypt to be irrigated by a network of artificial canals. By linking large numbers of rural communities together in a shared dependence on this public irrigation infrastructure, canalization introduced a radically new way of int...