Rivers Divided is a valuable study of the geopolitics of decolonization in South Asia. It focuses on the outcomes of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in the Indus River basin, particularly in Punjab and Kashmir. Daniel Haines explores the questions of territoriality, sovereignty, and state power that fueled the dispute over the division of the canals and irrigation works within the basin and that also shaped the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960. He contends that conventional studies on international law and water policy lack the conceptual tools for the critical analysis of the Indus waters dispute, and that the existing scholarly works on the subject fail to adequately “situate the Indus dispute as part of the concurrent processes of South Asian state-building, global decolonization, and shifting Western intervention in the region after independence” (p. 4). Therefore, he argues that a critical hydropolitics approach is necessary to fully understand the role of the natural environment in decolonization.

As a step in the process of decolonization, the construction of territoriality in South Asia required India and Pakistan to replace the poorly defined boundaries created by the Radcliffe Commission with specific borders that could be identified on a map and marked on the ground. In effect, both governments felt it necessary to firmly establish “the spatial basis of the Indian and Pakistani nation-states” (p. 13). In this process, water-sharing issues came to symbolize the ability of each government to effectively impose state control over their respective territories and thereby raised the stakes involved in the basin's rivers and in allocating water to both sides. Failure to successfully resolve the Indus dispute threatened to undercut the legitimacy of the new governments of India and Pakistan, and this pressure encouraged both sides to make rare trade-offs in their respective territorial claims in order to establish more clearly their authority over their national space (p. 182). Haines argues that the resulting IWT represents a particular moment in decolonization and that, despite its generally positive reputation, the treaty cannot serve as a model or template for the resolution of other water disputes within South Asia or elsewhere in the postcolonial world.

Haines utilizes a wide range of archival materials, much of which has not been used in previous studies of the IWT. These new sources allow him to identify previously unknown nuances in the water dispute, especially in the sometimes tense relationships between national and local governments in both India and Pakistan.

The one weakness of the book is Haines's evaluation of the literature of environmental history. He notes that Rivers Divided is not a work of environmental history but then makes the claim that “historians have had relatively little to say about the role that the natural environment played in the aftermath of empire” (p. 12). Given the recent work of Mahesh Rangarajan, William Beinart, and others, it does seem that environmental historians are increasingly addressing the postcolonial natural environment. Rivers Divided is a welcome addition to the conversation.