Arid empire: The entangled fates of Arizona and Arabia, By NatalieKoch, London: Verso. 2023. 208 pages. $35.95 (hardback). ISBN: 9781839763694

There may be no other landscape so routinely and reductively mythologized as the desert.Natalie Koch's book, Arid empire: The entangled fates of Arizona and Arabia, offers an antidote to such myths and serves as the latest iteration in her larger scholarly project examining the political lives of deserts.The book interrogates a set of technological and agricultural projects that demonstrate the political tethers that bind the Sonoran and Arabian deserts.Koch formulates the concept of "arid empire" to unite her sites of study, attending to the ways that expert knowledges have offered visions of control over desert lands, while agricultural production has provided the biopolitical symbol of enacted imperial power.This book makes a thoughtful addition to any reading list on the politics of knowledge, supplementing works like Tania Li's (2007) The will to improve, or Timothy Mitchell's (2002) Rule of experts.Koch places herself in the story of arid empire in two ways.In the first, she reflects on her childhood in Arizona and problematizes her sense of home in the state as an outcome of imperial work.This acknowledgment of settler colonialism provides an important background to the work, but was difficult to keep in focus in the latter part of the book.In her second self-placement, Koch questions how her work fits within a long tradition of American geographers studying deserts in Arabia.Her analysis is sincerely considerate of the implications of producing academic knowledge both at home and abroad.She frequently describes academics and university administrators as agents of empire, focusing on the significant impact that specific technocrats have had on the trajectories of desert politics.Koch's critical disposition offers a method of interrogating the opportunism that so frequently underpins desert projects that promise opportunity.The book gathers four main case studies to examine the sites and processes through which her concept of arid empire is enacted.In the first, Koch follows the history of date palm agriculture in Arizona and the establishment of the University of Arizona as an imperial institution of desert improvement.In tracing the lineage of date palm expertise, Koch shows how American researchers are functionally reselling agricultural knowledge to the government of Oman that was gleaned from Omani farmers a century earlier.In her second study, Koch examines the history of diplomatic relations that have resulted in contentious, water-intensive alfalfa cultivation in Arizona for singledestination export to Saudi Arabia.Koch demonstrates how this extractive agriculture gathered its momentum through the work of Arizona farming technologists before it came to the state.Her third inquiry focuses on the simple techno-optimist hopes that the desalination technologies could secure political legitimacy in the desert of Abu Dhabi.Koch argues that even if desalination never delivered on its material promises, it achieved the far more significant imaginative consolidation of desert futures around modern technology.In her final study, Koch examines the escapist fantasies and futuristic architecture of desert utopia projects like Arcosanti, Biosphere 2, and Masdar City.She details how these projects traffic in financial and ideological speculation rather than their professed commitment to science and future-building.Like any empire, this one sprawls.It covers too much ground to be easily synthesized and is too broad to be a believable unity.Koch's case studies are united by their common locations (i.e., desert landscapes) in Arizona and Arabia, but they are assigned to an analytical category that extends much further.The formulation of a general desert-region style of imperialism must necessarily draw from beyond these sites to match the comprehensiveness promised by the book's title and introduction.As an analytical frame, arid empire is an invitation for other scholars to add their work to the conversation that Koch has started.On the other hand, the comprehensiveness may be too much to expect from a singular book that provides such detailed empirical accounts of its subjects.The case studies offer critical insights into the force of knowledge production in struggles over land.Koch demonstrates the role that universities and researchers play as agents of empire, but her book does not include any treatment of conspicuous imperial violence or militarism.

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