Arid Empires in a Liquid World

Last weekend, I enjoyed reading Natalie Koch’s Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso 2023). This was a spontaneous read, but I was drawn to it because it offered another perspective on the relationship between the American west and the Middle East. Last year, I played around with these ideas in a paper that that still sits on my hard drive not doing much of anything called: “Bakken Babylon”.

I probably wrote the paper without fully understanding what I was trying to say. Koch’s book offers an intriguing and well-researched take on the connection between American attitudes toward the arid West and our attitudes and involvement in the Middle East. Her book starts with the American effort to use imported camels in the newly acquired western territories in the 1850s. While this experiment was not particularly successful, it did offer a vivid example of the connections between American imperialism in the West and their literal and imaginary involvement in the Middle East. 

Koch isn’t the first to observe this, of course. Any number of scholars have noted and explored how Biblical imagery and narratives informed American views of the West (and how views of the American West informed ideas about the Near East in the past and the present). Koch’s example, however, takes the symbolism this symbolism and makes it literal by tracing not only the strange story of how camels played a small role in American efforts to “conquer” the southwest, but also through the tangled relationship between the University of Arizona and various agricultural experiments in Oman, in Saudi Arabia, and in the United Arab Emirates. Researchers from the University of Arizona sought to share expertise acquired through farming in the arid southwest with the modernizing states of the Middle East. Ironically, some of the American expertise, such as varieties of dates grown in Arizona, originated in the Middle East. The process of sharing (or returning, in some cases) agricultural practices and technologies with the Middle East over the course of the 20th century followed the contours of growing American interest in the region. In other words, there is a relationship between American experiences as a colonial power in the arid West and American experiences abroad. The relationship isn’t tidy or linear and as entangled in various religious, literary, and even artistic imagery as immediate political or economic realities.

There are obvious parallels between Koch’s work and the work of Donald Worster. In Rivers of Empire, Worster shows how American attitudes toward water and rivers in the American West not only had roots in the Biblical imagination, but also the real experiences of British imperialism in India where massive efforts to control the flow of rivers were part of larger (and largely misguided) colonial schemes “to modernize” Indian agriculture. Like Koch’s camels, imperialism and the imaginary Middle East go hand-in-hand not only in the production of the contemporary American West, but also, reciprocally, in our attitudes toward “the Orient” (variously defined) more broadly.     

This brings me back to my little experiment with the Bakken and Babylon. While the connections between the Bakken and a real or imaginary Babylon are far less concrete than those explored by Koch, I do think that exploring the geographic fluidity of the American West does open the door to both new readings of American imperialism (as Koch has demonstrated), but also how the flow of water, oil, and capital create our modern world. Maybe this offers a literal reading of Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity by crossing it with Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. The result of this would be far less concrete, but perhaps also far more reflective of the entanglement of empire, resources, and capital in a 21st century world.