Iftekhar Iqbal's "The Range of the River"

Iftekhar Iqbal is Associate Professor of History at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Range of the River is set along the upper and middle Mekong. It follows the Akha community, whose “circulatory” pattern of movement was disrupted when French and Siamese border-making along the Mekong turned a fluid frontier into a taxed and policed line. The page then shifts to the Loutzu in Yunnan, whose “wild independence” rested on their ability to move cotton, salt, and other commodities along the river’s trading corridors, despite repeated attempts by Chinese officials to extract tribute. It closes in the lower Mekong, drawing on David Biggs’s history of hydraulic engineering and insurgency and Philip Taylor’s ethnography of Cham Muslims to show how ecological fluidity and access to fresh water shaped both resistance to state encroachment and Cham Muslim identities in the delta -- echoing Charles Wheeler’s ‘looking at the river, thinking of the sea’

Would a browser opening the book to page 99 get a fair sense of the whole? I think the Page 99 Test works reasonably well for The Range of the River. The page does not spell out the overarching argument, but it does place the reader in the midst of what the book is trying to do: track how imperial border-making, local mobility, and ecological infrastructures became tightly intertwined along Asia’s great river systems.

Throughout the book, “looking at the river, thinking of the sea” works as a prime protocol of reading and writing, and it captures one of the major spirits of the book. Scenes are anchored in specific river stretches, yet they are always oriented toward wider oceanic horizons, spanning both mountains and valleys. I move between the headwaters and deltas of rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red and the Yangzi, tracing how upland communities, traders, boaters, and officials negotiated fluvial networks that linked China, India, and Southeast Asia. Page 99 is typical in the way it juxtaposes different reaches and ethnic groups while keeping the river itself as the connective tissue.

Learn more about The Range of the River at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue