This innovative collected work offers a new way of understanding history, society, and climate by placing water at the center of human life. Focusing on monsoon Asia - home to nearly half the world's population - it explores how oceans, rivers, monsoons, and even humidity have shaped cultures, economies, politics, and everyday survival for centuries. Bringing together historians, anthropologists, geographers, and environmental scholars, the volume connects local waterscapes to regional and global Earth systems, showing how human actions have reshaped the hydrological cycle with planetary consequences. Through vivid case studies ranging from river basins and coastal cities to human bodies, beliefs, and technologies, the book reveals water as both a life-giving force and a source of risk, power, and conflict. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
