It is a commonplace that state formation in the ancient world—and perhaps especially in the Middle East—was deeply entangled with the environment. In Two Rivers Entangled, Dale Stahl asks how we might write histories of twentieth-century state formation in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey that take seriously the role of the Tigris and Euphrates. How did the rivers shape state and society, and vice versa? The book situates the twentieth-century states of the river basin in a much longer lineage of entangled development, while also arguing that the twentieth century marked a turning point—a period when the human ambition and ability to intervene in the environment grew exponentially.

The book is structured around four elements: water, salt, rock, and reservoir. Its narrative begins in early twentieth-century Ottoman Iraq and moves gradually upstream and forward in time. The first two chapters focus primarily on the British Empire in Iraq, whereas the latter two chapters emphasize Cold War Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria. Each chapter takes a somewhat different methodological approach, although across the book Stahl is interested in exploring and expanding how we think about agency and causality, drawing on the insights of environmental-technological history and “new materialism” to do so. This is how Stahl develops the concept of “entanglement,” which he uses to emphasize “process over a stable state, becoming over being” and to conceptualize “how material, society, and culture shape one another across time and space” (15).

Stahl shows how attentiveness to the multiple entangled agencies of the river basin can revise dominant accounts of historical causality most effectively in chapter 2, which deals with the political ecology of salt. Beginning in the 1920s and stretching into the 1950s and beyond, the British colonial administration and independent Iraqi state encouraged land reclamation as part of both flood prevention and development programs. Reclamation, whether using pumps or canals, increased soil salinization and the power of large landholders, with each reinforcing the other. Salinization, Stahl argues, “factors into nearly all the most frequently cited causes of social, political, and economic distress in Iraq during the 1950s: declining agricultural yields, indebtedness, dispossession, urban migration, poor health outcomes, and starvation” (81). Ultimately, Iraq’s oil wealth allowed the country to circumvent the problem of salinization, making the country increasingly dependent upon fossil energy as soil salinity continued to intensify. The chapter is especially useful because it remains rooted in the material properties of salt, while clearly showing how salt played a role in the familiar social and political dynamics of mid-century Iraq.

While often less directly concerned with the material of the basin, the third chapter, on rock, also offers an innovative approach to the relatively well-trodden history of Cold War dam projects. Here, Stahl considers the dams through literary analysis, both of poetry and other self-evidently literary texts, and of engineering documents. Looking specifically at the feasibility report for the Keban Dam in Turkey, Stahl argues that such reports constitute a genre with specific narrative conventions, showing how the authors depicted the (future) dam as both an economic object and a tool of social order. Like poetry, engineering documents are compelling when they can evoke both a recognizable present and a believable future, regardless of what might happen during the actual construction process. The point is not that the engineers were right or wrong, but that their writing helped produce material transformation. Stahl’s approach to technical documents as a literary genre is convincing, and his use of literary sources in this chapter and throughout the book is effective. However, it is difficult to assess a genre from a single source. Rather than, or in addition to, the extensive explanation of the technique of “techno-poetics,” I would have liked to see him use this technique to examine additional engineering sources, whether about Keban or the al-Tabqa Dam in Syria.

In addition to literary sources, which are often underused in historical scholarship, Stahl draws on scientific studies, news, and numerous Iraqi, Turkish, British, and Syrian memoirs. Most of his archival sources are British. Although this reflects the deep involvement of the British Empire and British engineers in Iraq, it imposes some limits on the book’s ability to draw conclusions about state-building, especially in the Ottoman period.

The book speaks to several scholarly literatures, in addition to its theoretical concern with the literature on agency and “vital materialism.” Chapters 1 and 2 engage largely with literature on the British Empire, especially the role of infrastructure in empire, and with scholarship on Iraq. These chapters primarily use ecology to challenge existing interpretations of Iraqi history. Chapters 3 and 4 contribute to the literature on Cold War development programs and especially mid-century Turkey, using novel source material and methods to build on existing work. All four chapters are connected by a shared emphasis on the question of civilizational discourse and how it shaped and was shaped by material transformation throughout the twentieth century. Stahl is careful to point out that the idea of “civilization” is not simply a justification or ideological window dressing for more utilitarian or more insidious aims, but rather that “civilization” is part of a “kind of world building where meanings and materialities co-emerge” (142). Recurring in different guises throughout the book’s four chapters, “civilization” serves as an important throughline for what might otherwise be somewhat autonomous case studies.

Two Rivers Entangled offers a valuable addition to the literature, particularly in how it suggests and models novel approaches to writing entangled environmental histories, and in how it reads a wide range of different sources together. In addition to historians of Iraq and Turkey, it will be useful to those interested in finding historical methods that align with the theoretical concerns of the “new materialism.”