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A hydraulic empire (also known as a hydraulic despotism or a water monopoly empire) arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and gives rise to a specialized bureaucracy.
Civilizations
A developed "hydraulic civilization" maintains control over its population by means of controlling the supply of water. The term was coined by the German American historian Karl A. Wittfogel (1896 - 1988), in Oriental Despotism (1957). Wittfogel asserted that such "hydraulic civilizations" – although they were neither all located in the Orient nor characteristic of all Oriental societies – were essentially different from those of the West. A falling water droplet Water (from the Anglo-Saxon and Low German wæter) is a colourless, tasteless, and odourless substance that is essential to all known forms of life and is the most universal solvent. ...
German-Americans are citizens of the United States of German ancestry. ...
A hydraulic empire (also known as a hydraulic despotism or a water monopoly empire) arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and gives rise to a specialized bureaucracy. ...
In The Constant Feud: Forest Versus Desert (http://www.eg-ban.com/constant-feud.html), the late Israeli author E. G. Ban used the "hydraulic empire" theory to explain the hostility between the Middle East and Western civilization, starting with the Persian invasion of Greece, leading through the Punic Wars, the Jewish rebellions against Rome and eventually to the conflicts between the Islamic world and the West. In E. G. Ban's view, Middle Easterners were thought to hate the West because of a feeling of deprivation and envy resulting from the desertification of their own environment. The Punic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Rome and the Phoenician city of Carthage. ...
Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi arid and dry sub-humid areas into desert, resulting from various factors including climatic variations and human activities. ...
Most of the first civilizations in history, such as Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley civilization, China and pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru, were hydraulic empires. Most hydraulic empires existed in desert regions, but imperial China also had some such characteristics, due to the exacting needs of rice cultivation. The Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico. ...
Map of Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was the civilization of the Nile Valley between about 3000 BC and the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. As a civilization based on irrigation, it is the quintessential example of a hydraulic empire. ...
Mesopotamia ( Greek: Μεσοποταμία, translated from Old Persian Miyanrudan the Land between the Rivers or the Aramaic name Beth-Nahrin two rivers) is a region of Southwest Asia. ...
The Indus Valley Civilization existed along the Indus River in present-day Pakistan. ...
A dune in the Egyptian desert Desert in California In geography, a desert is a landscape form or region that receives little precipitation. ...
Species Oryza barthii Oryza glaberrima Oryza latifolia Oryza longistaminata Oryza punctata Oryza rufipogon Oryza sativa References ITIS 41975 2002-09-22 This article is about the food grain, not the university or Condoleezza Rice; see also rice (disambiguation). ...
Analysis According to Wittfogel's analysis, control over the vital resource of water gave rise to the emergence of social classes, and widespread specialization typical of centralized urban life, while it also gave the government power of life and death over its population; thus a particularly extreme despotism is typical of hydraulic empires - historically, many of these empires revered their rulers as gods. Despotism is government by a singular authority, either a single person or tightly knit group, which rules with absolute power. ...
The term God is ordinarily used to designate a singular, universal Supreme Being. ...
Governments were extremely centralized, with no trace of an independent aristocracy - this is completely different to the decentralized feudalism which existed in medieval Europe. Though tribal societies had structures that were usually personal in nature, exercised by a patriarch over a tribal group related by various degrees of kinship, hydraulic hierarchies gave rise to impersonal government as an established permanent institution. Popular revolution was impossible: a dynasty may die out or be overthrown by force, but the new regime would differ very little from the old one. Hydraulic empires were only ever destroyed by foreign conquerors. The Ancient Greek term Aristocracy meant a system of government with rule by the best. This is the first definition given in most dictionaries. ...
Feudalism refers to a general set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility of Europe during the Middle Ages, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs. ...
A dynasty is a family or extended family which retains political power across generations, or more generally, any organization which extends dominance in its field even as its particular members change. ...
Wittfogel's ideas when applied to China have been harshly criticized by scholars such as Joseph Needham who argued essentially that Wittfogel was operating from ignorance of basic Chinese history. Needham argued that the Chinese government was not despotic, that was not dominated by a priesthood, and that Wittfogel fails to realize the necessity and presence of bureaucracy in modern Western civilization. Joseph Needham (December 9, 1900 – March 24, 1995) was a British biochemist and pre-eminent authority on Chinese science and author of definitive texts on the subject. ...
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