Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 130

This important study explores the concept of water as a whole, at scales ranging from local to global, and across disciplinary boundaries, ultimately using it as a vehicle through which to understand the relationships between human societies, their governance, and the environments they inhabit. O’Hara argues that water is both a critical site of contestation in late twentieth-century British society, and a means by which to understand that society. In order to demonstrate this, he uses an impressive range of research papers, government reports, minutes, proceedings, and correspondence alongside newspapers and periodicals, and other media sources to unpack both the content and context of government legislation around water, and the impact of this, first on wider British society, and then on international relations. While the focus is on water politics in post-war Britain, it promotes a deeper and wider approach to understanding environmental history on a global scale, and the changes in the modern British state in the longer term. The book also addresses politics at several levels, from the complex negotiations between nations to the politics arising in local and domestic milieux, and thereby representing the stakes held in water by a variety of different publics, with a variety of competing priorities. Tracing the way in which these priorities have been negotiated forms a picture of the changing politics of water in Britain and the wider world throughout the twentieth century. As O’Hara convincingly argues, these politics are often far removed from simple questions of social class or neatly delineated ideas of Left and Right, instead representing a messy, shifting, and ‘fluid’ approach to governance around the theme of water. In this, the book fits well into the historiographies of both environmentalism and British politics, with much to contribute to both.

O’Hara places his work at the confluence between environmental, social and political histories, influenced by Terje Tvedt and Richard Coopey’s conceptualization of the ‘third layer’ of water systems: the management practices and ‘habits of thought’ around water. He agrees with the viewpoint recently espoused by environmental historians that history should be the starting point of all new policy proposals and formulations. The politics of water in post-war Britain traces the place of water in the historiography of environmental history, convincingly making the case that a thorough appreciation of economic, social, political, personal and emotional histories is essential to carrying out a ‘new type of environmental historiography’, which follows the evolving relationship between human beings and the natural world. He identifies several lacunae in previous scholarship, including the dearth of twentieth-century water histories in comparison to those covering the Victorian water industry, and, linked to this, the tendency for ‘material and technocratic cadences’ to dominate these histories at the expense of socio-political and domestic narratives. O’Hara seeks to redress this balance, placing the politics of power around domestic water availability, water safety, and water usage alongside developments in water and environmental politics on national and international scales.

The book is divided into chapters covering water in its different aspects, explored through its different interrelationships with human beings. The earlier chapters examine the way that the rise of environmental politics and international co-operation in relation to environmental matters helped to re-conceptualize water in Britain and farther afield; a case study of the floods on Britain’s east coast in 1953 and the public, political and press reactions, using them to contextualize twenty-first-century disaster preparedness and reactions in the aftermath of flooding. The book then moves on to the theme of pollution, covering riverine and oceanic pollution over the next two chapters. It draws out the roots of modern legislation from the nineteenth-century crisis of contamination as pollution control legislation initially failed to keep pace with industrial development, and follows the growing scale of public and political concern to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The final three chapters of the book are devoted to the politics of water as they applied to everyday domestic life: water involved in leisure activities; water provision in the home; and the fluoridation of water. These chapters represent the convincing filling of an intriguing lacuna around the use of public water for leisure and domestic purposes, and the flows of power and meaning associated therewith. This is necessarily an issue of women’s and children’s history, expanding the fascinating interdisciplinary aspect of the study, and making clear the gendered way in which clean water has historically been discussed, and the impact this has had on long term and wide ranging policies on water both inside and outside the home.

This produces a largely holistic-feeling history of Britain’s water politics, which embraces the importance of water to all sections of society, in both urban and rural contexts. However, despite good coverage of the role played by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in the development of water politics in Britain, the issue of the availability of water in rural areas, and the admirable depth to which previously somewhat neglected themes such as the domestic and leisure usage of water are investigated, it was surprising to find that the use of water by the agricultural community itself is not explored in more detail. The use of water in increasingly intensifying agriculture, as mentioned by O’Hara, is a significant factor of its own in global water politics, and the farming community has its own unique set of needs, problems and drivers when it comes to water usage and the politics surrounding it, which are separate from those relating to the wider rural community and its domestic needs. Under these circumstances, it seems a shame that the views of the industry at local and regional level are underrepresented in this work.

The politics of water in post-war Britain has much to offer the fields of environmental history and political history. It represents the drawing together of a number of interdisciplinary threads to address the topic of water, and the politics it engenders, as a whole, which I am certain will prove useful and informative for the future study of water politics and environmental history as a whole.