Abstract

This article examines a recent historiographical trend that has focused on rivers, and looks at its evolution in relation to the broader field of environmental history. The studies produced in recent decades have shared many characteristics: the periodization, the analytical approach, and the regions that have been focused on. Moreover, many of these works have used rivers and their drainage basins as a viewpoint through which to explore the socio-economic dynamics present during the period of modernisation. This has been carried out in relation both to economic modernisation, focusing on the role of rivers in the industrialisation process and on how this process has transformed the rivers, and to political modernisation, analysing the symbolic and practical use of rivers in the state and nation building process.