{"id":81724,"date":"2025-08-20T06:08:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T06:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/81724\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T06:08:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T06:08:14","slug":"three-rivers-by-robert-winder-when-geography-is-the-driving-force-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/81724\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Rivers by Robert Winder \u2014 when geography is the driving force of history"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the more obvious reasons non-fiction<\/a> writers are drawn to rivers is that they appear to offer a ready-made narrative, sweeping the reader from source to sea, cradle to grave, preface to prologue. But for every river that begins as a solitary fountainhead, another seeps out of a bog at umpteen different places; some rivers empty monolithically into the sea, others end in a delta of proliferating branches. <\/p>\n

That is also a truer model of how history tends to unfold: a multitude of beginnings flowing to a multitude of endings. In Three Rivers Robert Winder makes a case for a more deterministic approach, advancing \u201cunglamorous physical geography as being the force behind historical events\u201d. The book was conceived in a railway tunnel beneath the Gotthard Pass, Switzerland. <\/p>\n

As he gazed at a map of the region, Winder realised that western Europe\u2019s three great rivers, the Rhine, the Rh\u00f4ne and the Po, could each be said (allowing for some license) to rise from the massif above his head. By tracing their courses in a three-way, outward-flowing journey, he could examine how, individually and collectively, they gave rise to the three great national cultures of Germany, France and Italy \u2014 and in so doing helped to unify the Europe we know today. <\/p>\n

\"Map<\/p>\n

It is a beautifully elegant premise. His river narratives are braided with such subtlety that it\u2019s possible to forget he is describing three rivers and not one. This is not inappropriate given Winder\u2019s faith, stated at the outset, that the \u201cdifferences between Europe\u2019s nations, however clear and clung to, disguise a profound similarity\u201d. The rivers serve as emblems and instruments of unity, inspiring \u201cideas of compromise and co-operation\u201d. <\/p>\n

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, for example, following the catastrophe of the Thirty Years\u2019 War, led to the recognition of the Rhine as a \u201cmutual resource, not merely something to be fought over\u201d. The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, founded in 1815 and eventually counting France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Switzerland and Italy among its members, is arguably the world\u2019s oldest international organisation.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s main interest is the political, philosophical, artistic and scientific flourishing these waters have helped to spawn<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s main interest is the political, philosophical, artistic and scientific flourishing these waters have helped to spawn, from Dante\u2019s Po, winding its way through Renaissance Italy, to the \u201cconduit of the Reformation\u201d that is the Rhine, to the pioneering of the science of glaciology on the Rh\u00f4ne Glacier. <\/p>\n

The book\u2019s standard bearer is Johann Gottfried Tulla, the young German engineer who in 1817 oversaw the \u201crectification\u201d of the upper Rhine (which looms largest of the three rivers). In order to reduce seasonal flooding and improve navigability, Tulla\u2019s grand project straightened the river\u2019s meanders, excised its islands and filled in its oxbow lakes. <\/p>\n

The effect of his vast canalisation was to make the Rhine \u201cmore useful: a heaving corridor for trade, freight, power generation, transport and tourism\u201d. The river had, Winder writes, \u201cbeen brought to heel\u201d. <\/p>\n

The price of that subjugation was the mass loss of habitat and the poisoning of the river\u2019s waters. In 1850 it was home to an estimated 280,000 tonnes of salmon; a century later there was none.<\/p>\n

Three Rivers isn\u2019t travel writing but history founded in geography. Nevertheless the potted histories of his stopping-off places sometimes have a cruise-brochure quality, as if we are observing the passing world from a deckchair, browsing Wikipedia. <\/p>\n

Winder could hardly have ignored the slicks of effluent, and he is attentive to the melting of the glaciers that give rise to these waters. But if a current of thinking connects Tulla\u2019s \u201crectification\u201d with the present-day plight of Europe\u2019s waterways it is not examined here. The disappearing of the Rh\u00f4ne glacier is merely another drama in that river\u2019s long story, rather than heralding, as it may do, the shattering of that story.<\/p>\n

During the arid summer of 2022, a mercifully unfamiliar object was exposed by the sluggish Rhine at Worms: a so-called hunger stone, engraved with the year 1947, an earlier time when the water had dropped so drastically, and postwar Germany was menaced by famine. Part memorial, part warning.<\/p>\n

\"Book<\/p>\n

If that river, along with the Rh\u00f4ne and the Po, are the cradles of modern Europe, we are left to wonder what will become of the continent if one day the hunger stones are permanently dry. Unacknowledged in Winder\u2019s paean is a troubling possibility: that, whatever peace and prosperity these three great rivers have helped to bring to the continent, the division and disorder that have also characterised Europe\u2019s past will be as nothing compared to a water-depleted future. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways That Made Europe by Robert Winder Elliott & Thompson \u00a320, 304 pages <\/p>\n

William Atkins is the author of \u2018Exiles: Three Island Journeys\u2019 (Faber)<\/p>\n

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