Karl August Wittfogel

Karl August Wittfogel (1896 to 1988) was a German-American historian, sinologist and playwright who became one of the best known theorists of the link between state power and the control of water. Born in the Province of Hanover, he studied philosophy, history, sociology and geography at Leipzig and other German universities, then sinology, and took his doctorate at Frankfurt in 1928 with a study of the agrarian and industrial productive forces of China. He was a member of the Communist Party of Germany and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research. After arrest by the Nazis in 1933 he left Germany for England and then the United States, where he held posts at Columbia University and, from 1947 to 1966, the University of Washington. His book Oriental Despotism (1957) builds on Marx and Max Weber to argue that large irrigation works required a bureaucratic state, which he called a hydraulic empire. The thesis was sharply disputed by sinologists such as Frederick W. Mote and John K. Fairbank, and Wittfogel himself turned fiercely anticommunist after the Second World War.