Stateless irrigation

Karl Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis says irrigation requires a strong centralized state. Here are some counterexamples.

Asia

Neolithic Mesopotamia

The Samarra culture which introduced irrigation in Neolithic Mesopotamia predated the first states. Heide Goettner-Abendroth writes they established irrigation "by means of community agreement without any leader responsible for the planning. Stamp seals and counting tokens helped to allocate these fairly to each household; they are clan marks rather than signs of private ownership."

Indus Valley

There is debate regarding the extent to which the Indus Valley Civilization used artificial irrigation.

Zomia

Irrigation systems arose independently of states in Zomia.

States, it should be emphasized, did not typically, at least until the colonial era, construct these expanses of padi fields, nor did they play the major role in their maintenance. All the evidence points to the piecemeal elaboration of padi lands by kinship units and hamlets that built and extended the small diversion dams, sluices, and channels required for water control. Such irrigation works often predated the creation of state cores and, just as frequently, survived the collapse of many a state that had taken temporary advantage of its concentrated manpower and food supply.[93] The state might batten itself onto a wet-rice core and even extend it, but rarely did the state create it. The relationship between states and wet-rice cultivation was one of elective affinity, not one of cause and effect."

Bali

James Scott:

See, in general, Jonathan Rigg, The Gift of Water: Water Management, Cosmology, and the State in Southeast Asia (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992), and, especially, in that volume, Philip Stott, “Ankor: Shifting the Hydraulic Paradigm,” 47–58, and Janice Staargardt, “Water for Courts or Countryside: Archeological Evidence from Burma and Thailand Revisited,” 59–72. The point of that volume is, in part, to lay permanently to rest the thesis of hydraulic societies proposed by Karl Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976, 9th ed.), for Southeast Asia at any rate. Among other things, the demographic realities and the possibility of flight prevented any large-scale mobilization of forced labor. The scholarly consensus is best expressed by Clifford Geertz in his examination of the complex Balinese system of terracing and irrigation. “In fact the state role in … construction seems to have been minor at best.… In the first place, the growth of the subak system was almost certainly a very gradual, piecemeal process, not an all-at-once collective effort demanding authoritative coordination of huge masses of men. By the nineteenth century, the system was essentially complete, but even before the nineteenth century its expansion was slow, steady, and almost imperceptible. The notion that impressive irrigation works need highly centralized states to construct them rests on ignoring this fact: such works are not built at one blow.” Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 197. See also the references in Geertz and, also for Bali in particular, Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power and the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Europe

Revolutionary Spain

In anarchist-run areas during the 1936-9 Spanish revolution, "Crops were diversified, irrigation extended, reforestation initiated, and tree nurseries started."