Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization.

Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boccaletti-honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford-shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.

We see with clarity how irrigation's structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of...