UC Santa Cruz

Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley provides a social, spatial, and historical account of the role of water management in the Anglo conquest of California. This work focuses on the San Joaquin Valley from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century to evaluate efforts by settlers, farmers, scientists, engineers, and administrators to render land and water into objects of knowledge, ownership, investment, and use. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, I develop the concept of hydraulic settlement to describe the strategic use of hydraulic infrastructure, governmental institutions, and financial instruments to carry out a mode of colonial settlement and capital accumulation defined by its relationship to the manipulation and control of water. Charting a contingent history from Indigenous reservations and swampland reclamation through canal irrigation, hydraulical materialism, and political hydrography to water districts, groundwater extraction, and the bonds of settlement, this research reveals how the seemingly neutral processes used to manage, measure, and monetize water belie understudied histories of dispossession, exclusion, inequality, and violence.