Mapping Water in Dominica

Mapping Water in Dominica is an ambitious undertaking for understanding the complex nexus of water consumption, water availability, and the myriad ways in which water is manipulated to convey nuanced messages of status and power within the colonial plantation environment.The book does not disappoint in taking us on a journey through this rarely visited landscape.With water providing the central, rather than peripheral, loci to the colonial enterprise, Mark Hauser combines geophysical mapping of space with the mapping of the social politics of water, waterways, and associated material culture to reveal the many permutations and meanings that water has as an arbiter of power.Others have explored water issues or environment in colonial contexts, but few have provided the depth of integration he has achieved in this cogent synthesis, which represents a decade of work based on simple but profound questions.Hauser addresses water from multiple perspectives within plantation society and, scaffolding on Vincent Brown's framework, situates water within the "predicament of slavery."His vivid imagery is bold and refreshing, and there are no tired phrases or cliches to explicate the phenomena being considered, as new vocabulary is generated to convey the meanings revealed by his approach for interpreting waterscapes as a functional metaphor for the fluid nature of social relations on the landscape.Although the book is illustrated with maps and images, there is, unfortunately, no list of figures for easy reference.Hauser uses the introduction and first two chapters to carefully guide readers through the definitions, context, methodology, and subtle complexities of waterscapes, both as they are integrated into a plantation landscape and as they act as their own spheres of social interaction.A detailed description of hydrogeography serves to explain the distributional disparities of water access during the colonial period that confronted both French and English colonizers and their enslaved laborers.This is followed by thought-provoking interpretations of "hydrosociality," wherein water emerges as a commodity that influences social relations at different scales.Readers are invited to reimagine water as material culture and to examine the assemblage of water infrastructure in new ways.Hauser explores waterways like foodways to untangle the complexities of plantation life where water is a giver of life but also a currency.Chapter 3 investigates the soils, hydrology, and land management strategies implemented during the eighteenth century to capture water for plantation use, noting that water insecurities were very real, even on an island with 365 rivers, owing to its unique geography.This insecurity and unequal access led

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