Assessments by historians of Asia's irrigation systems and irrigation‐related civil engineering techniques have been based on the scantiest of historical or empirical data. Naturally, they have ranged from one extreme to the other. Of these, the one most easily recognized and debated was provided by Karl Wittfogel whose theories led to the idea of “hydraulic civilizations”.
A diametrically opposite assessment has been provided by some Indian historians who have concluded that there was no significant irrigation technology in use at all. Symbolic of this view is R. Majumdar and H. C. Raychaudhuri's An Advanced History of India, in which the authors make a categorical statement on the “comparative absence of artificial irrigation” in eighteenth century India.
However both views – fairly representative of the historiographical terrain – have had to be revised considerably because of the emergence of new historical materials and investigations. These are reflected in new literature...
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Alvares, C. (2008). Irrigation in India and Sri Lanka. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8663
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