James C. Scott (2025). In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life Brings. Yale University Press. 220 pp.
In Praise of Floods, puts the Irrawaddy River itself—not generals, kings, peasants or revolutionaries—at the center of Myanmar’s history, and in doing so establishes principles for how river basins are best understood.
James C. Scott (Shwe Yoe) was one of the most important social scientists of the last 50 years. He began his international career in Burma in 1958 but was unable to return after Ne Win’s 1962 coup until 2012. His affection for Myanmar, however, did not diminish, and he then went back regularly until 2021. He was even known to give lectures in Burmese in the 2010s. He died at the age of 87 in 2024, and In Praise of Floods is his final book.
What Scott is most famous for is descriptions of how farmers resisted exploitation by feudal lords and politicians who sent armies and police to tax them. His research led to provocative books like The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Weapons of the Weak and The Art of Not Being Governed. Their creative tension was always between the cunning of the “weak” peasantries and the simplifications powerful governing elites make to squeeze surpluses from them.
In Praise of Floods is a departure in focusing instead on rivers and floods. Scott believes that they are “alive” in the sense that they are born, develop and shrink across millennia. In the Irrawaddy’s case, it created the fertile plains of central Burma at the end of the last Ice Age 12,500 years ago.
Scott’s point is that rivers emerge at particular times, support different types of life, shift channels and courses, and eventually disappear. He calls this process the river’s “pulse.” For the Irrawaddy, the low-water point is usually in February, and as the rains resume, about eight times as much water flows out of the highlands above Mandalay by September, bursting out of the meandering channels formed in previous years.
For thousands of years, perhaps from 10,000 BCE until about 5000 BCE, this meant that migratory people avoided the floods by annually moving their camps to higher ground. Life came from the rich topsoil the floodwaters laid down across the flat plains stretching from Mandalay, which is only 80 m above sea level, to the Andaman Sea some 1,000 km to the south. Early humans harvested the bounty of the river by fishing, netting birds, hunting game, collecting mussels, and gathering fruit and roots. The flood pulses determined what the people ate, and where they lived and settled.
By about 3000 BCE people began creating new ways to use the temperamental river and sought to bend the Irrawaddy’s surges to their own needs. They started by scattering seeds along the shoreline as the flood waters receded. After tending the crop of grain for a few months they could harvest more food than ever before, but this type of food needed to be processed and stored in granaries, to be eaten while waiting for the next harvest to mature.
This is also when they began managing water flows with weirs, fish traps, drainage canals and dikes, and eventually developed the engineering capacity to flatten fields with animal-drawn plows and other tools needed to harvest paddy rice. Human societies came to see the living river as a tamable resource, whose annual surges could be engineered, so people confidently settled into permanent villages near the rivers. There, the arts, markets, religion, literature, architecture and other human pursuits flourished. By about 2,200 years ago, the Pyu states began to emerge, building permanent cities, markets and worship centers.
And when the river behaved as planned, it was a great thing and populations flourished. But there were new dangers too for people living in fixed villages and cities, because the river pulses did not always rise and fall as humans intended—after all, Scott writes, the river was also alive, and perhaps even had a mind of its own. So when the monsoons arrived late or not at all, there would be a drought. Or when they arrived early and in force, there were floods.
Humans and the rest
A particularly creative touch in Scott’s book is his concluding chapters about non-human life, which includes fish, animals and plants, as well as the ubiquitous Burmese spirits, the Nats. A charismatic character, the Irrawaddy river dolphin organizes the other creatures of the river to comment on the algae, molluscs, worms, larvae, zooplankton and microbes, most of which are ignored by homo sapiens, who is only interested in the river as it applies to human endeavors.
As Scott admits, these chapters fit awkwardly with the overall tone of the book. But surely in his final book he can be given some leeway. He is correct, moreover, that social science needs to acknowledge the spiritual life that is important to the ecology of places like the Irrawaddy valley and delta.
Flooding is a catastrophe for humans, but the “infrastructure” of non-human life, including plants, fish, mammals, birds, and of course the river itself are perhaps more ambivalent, or at least have a different perspective on the river pulses. So, for that matter perhaps do the Nats.
Scott’s emphasis on these spirits reflects stories that his research associates Maung Maung Oo and Naing Tun Lin collected while travelling along the Irrawaddy seeking to understand what locals knew. They travelled from the headwaters of Kachin State through the dry zone of Magwe and Sagaing. The spirits must be placated because they are believed to cause both those disastrous floods and the good fortunes of farmers, fishers and hunters. And then there are the dangers of the surrounding forests, which are also effected by the Nats.
Scott soon segues into more modern descriptions of the Irrawaddy watershed, in which the hydrodynamics of the water surges are highlighted in the context of modern social problems like deforestation, mining, and rebellion. All such activities disturb the ecological balance, and the capacity of humans to manage the Irrawaddy.
Full circle
Scott’s lifetime of creative scholarship is impressive. He started in Burma, studied in Vietnam, went to Malaysia, and ended up studying the economics, politics and psychology of the oppressed, and how highlanders respond to attempts to control them. In Praise of Floods brings this career full circle; he is back in Burma and writing about geography. As he writes in his preface, he planned two more years of field research, following the stories of farmers, river dolphins, spirits and flooding himself, but was prevented by the 2021 coup. His own public activism supporting the Spring Revolution made a return even less likely.
But even without these field data, the book pushes social scientists yet again to consider the perspectives of beings they typically ignore. Scott spent a lifetime searching for what he once called “hidden transcripts“—the voices of people overlooked by rulers and states. In this final book he tries something still more audacious: hidden transcripts of dolphins, spirits, forests, floods and the river itself. It is an appropriately unruly ending to the provocative intellectual life of James C. Scott.
Tony Waters is a professor of sociology at Leuphana University, Germany. His most recent book is The Socio-Political Systems of Highland Burma and the Art of Governance.