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Cook - The Aswan Low Dam and Modernizing the Nile

Tags: egypt, papers

The completion of the Aswan Low Dam was premised on orientialist perceptions that the British would ‘modernize’ the Egyptians.

  • Ended up miscalculating
    • Did not respect the environmental impacts of this
      • British engineers saw this as a time to experiment as well as a time to dig into their “Christian” past for relics
    • Did not respect the cyclic abundance of the Nile
      • Farmers now needed to use more fertilizer
      • Mitchell notes that by 1933 due to the Aswan Low Dam project only, “one-fifth of the Nile valley was now irrigated by the river’s annual flood, which in the past had fertilized the soil by depositing a layer of silt and nutrients…By the end of the 1930s Egyptian farmers were using 600,000 tons of fertilizer a year - pg 7, from Mitchel - Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity
  • Attempts at the regulating the Nile had been done before
  • Persistent belief from the British that the Egyptians were somehow “squandering” the Nile
  • Dam did not account for salination like in irrigation in iraq with the dujayla land project