This ambitious, historically sweeping study of water in the basin of Mexico casts a wide disciplinary net and captures in its wake some valuable observations and intriguing insights as well as the occasional exaggerated interpretation. Framed as a study of the ways that allocation, management and access to water have established the contours of citizenship in Mexico, this book is equally important and perhaps more analytically path-breaking for its focus on state formation and water's role in the rise, fall and transformation of governance regimes in Mexico. José Esteban Castro's decision to use a key natural resource like water as a springboard for examining large-scale political and social changes in how society is organised and the ways that citizens connect to each other and the state is a brilliant one, and could be fruitfully applied to a number of country contexts because of the importance of water to all major producer and consumer functions, no matter the extent of modernisation. But it is a pure stroke of genius to use water as the entry point for studying Mexico, since water abundance – and more recently, water scarcity – have marked that country's history, both geologically and socio-politically, for ages.

The basin of Mexico, the geographic focus of this book, comprised a series of lakes, canals and floating gardens that, because of their easy navigation and fertile character, served as the home base for early governing empires (first the Aztecs, then the Spaniards) and, eventually, for the capital city of the modern state (first during the Independence period and then in the aftermath of the country's 1910 Revolution). The challenges of governing the nation from this particular location linked water to state formation from early on, even as it produced social and political tensions with citizens over the appropriation, management and supply of water.

Conflicts over water in the basin of Mexico marked the rise and fall of empires and regimes throughout that country's past, accelerating as the relative successes of post-revolutionary state formation brought unparalleled levels of urbanisation and a degree of ecological crisis that itself set the stage for sustained political conflicts over water. Concentration of population, industry and governing institutions in and around the capital city ensured a steady depletion of aquifers and groundwater (through consumption and/or water displacement, as the city slowly sunk under the weight of people and a new political and industrial infrastructure), lending urgency to the issue of water as time passed. Urbanisation and water depletion not only called into question the traditional agricultural and agro-commercial basis of employment in the central basin, thereby pitting powerful state and private sector protagonists of the country's industrial future against its agricultural past. They also made traditional forms of water-based agriculture that characterised this geographic area close to obsolete, despite UNESCO protection of this unique form of chinampa-based cultivation.

Just as important, the revolutionary state's plans for political and economic modernisation challenged the longstanding property arrangements rooted in collective forms of land tenure and management based on indigenous traditions of agricultural production and self-governance, which ran counter to more liberal interpretations of rights and (individual) property ownership. To the extent that political battles over – and the subsequent legitimacy of – the post-revolutionary state rested heavily on the resolution of the ‘agrarian question’ more generally, and in particular on the state's political and institutional capacities to accommodate chinamperos and other traditional forms of land ownership and cultivation in the water-logged basin of Mexico, this book's focus on water access, depletion and management offers a unique lens for examining both citizenship and state formation.

The fact that struggles between indigenous communities and the state over water and water rights continue to be contentious political issues in Mexico will ensure a contemporary audience for this book. But its contributions and scholarly richness come from Castro's concerted efforts to trace these struggles historically, and from the disaggregation of the distinctive issues under contention and their macro-sociological and political implications. The book addresses the theoretical and empirical dimensions of water management, citizenship and state formation separately, in individual chapters, leading to a final chapter where these threads are woven together in a single, theoretically-informed narrative. Castro's grasp of social science and political theory is admirable, and a good reason to read this book; yet he also gives a legible overview of the main ecological issues at stake during the last five hundred years or so, starting with the pre-Colombian period and moving to the present, paying most attention to the colonial and post-revolutionary periods.

Overall, the book strikes a readable balance in its treatment of the technical dimensions of water management, the geological peculiarities of the Mexican basin, the ways that citizenship attributes have been ‘written’ into administrative controls and citizen disputes over water across a historical variety of state forms, and the scholarly challenges of considering water a civil, economic and/or political ‘right’ over which contemporary citizenship struggles now unfold. Still, there are a few issues that remain underdeveloped, or overdeveloped as the case may be, perhaps because nuance and depth are inevitably lost in a book with such a broad chronological and epistemological sweep. In particular, the relationship between access to water and access to land is insufficiently analysed, either empirically or conceptually, which is somewhat surprising given the book's focus on the basin of Mexico, where the two are inextricably linked in a variety of ways, despite the administrative and legal efforts to compartmentalise them as distinctive. So too the relationships – if not tensions – between the political and economic objectives of governing regimes, and the ways that urbanisation (which led to water depletion) formed part and parcel of a national industrialisation project in which agriculture languished, could have been more carefully articulated.

Also missing is any serious discussion of the political party institutions that linked citizens to the state, especially in the decades of post-revolutionary state formation. Whether this is because the corporatist institutions of the one-party state (representing peasants, workers and popular middle classes) were actually insignificant in water conflicts; whether they were merely overlooked by Castro, who focused most attention on the federal executive's water agencies (like the Comisión Nacional de Agua, or CNA); or whether the collective nature of these organisations prevented Castro from identifying them as relevant channels for T. H. Marshall-inspired citizenship claims – themselves premised on a certain methodological individualism – is hard to know. But in a study of citizenship and state formation in Mexico, one would expect the corporatist institutions that linked rulers to the ruled to play a more central role, at least under one-party rule.

More disconcerting is the over-emphasis on a few framing concepts and ideas. Principal among these is the inordinate attention paid to Norbert Elias and his concept of the civilising process. Not a chapter goes by without a quote (or two) from Elias, although most of the time the relevance is far from obvious. One gets the sense that Castro is on a quest to find a concise theoretical framing to buttress his far-reaching historical and empirical narrative. But it also might be due to the fact that the sweeping historical accounting of water struggles does come across as somewhat descriptive, with little attention paid to identifying causality or to offering middle-range theories that could account for the longer-term patterns of state formation and citizenship seen in Mexico. Whatever the origins of the preoccupation with Elias, as a theoretical reference point he hangs a bit intrusively over the grounded essentials of the story, never quite integrating into the historical narrative so much as sitting awkwardly on top of it. In stylistic terms, this mars an otherwise fascinating and important book. After all, the consistency with which struggles over control and access to water have emerged and re-emerged sustain Castro's more universal claims about the ongoing tensions between water, power and citizenship, even as they give him a basis for underscoring striking empirical continuities, over time, in terms of who wins and who loses in these struggles. This is much better than grand theory any day, and will keep the reader engaged, reflective and curious to know more about what comes next for citizens, water and the state in Mexico.