Shokr - Hydropolitics

BOB
---
Hydropolitics, Economy, and the Aswan High Dam in Mid-Century Egypt
Author(s): Ahmad Shokr
Source: The Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 9-31
Published by: Arab Studies Institute
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27934054
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Hydropolitics,
Economy,
andthe
Aswan
High
DaminMid-Century
Egypt
Ahmad
Shokr
T he building of the Aswan High Dam offers a rich case study that elucidates
how post-colonial nation-building projects and economic development
regimes have employed twentieth-century ideas and practices in resource
and economic management in the post-war period. The High Dam project was part
of a wider effort, led by the Free Officers' regime, to undertake an ambitious social
and economic transformation, guided by principles of economic independence and
social welfare, and that was to be achieved through technocratic state planning. In
the 1950s, Nasser's government began to establish a statist economic development
regime based on centralized planning and the expansion of the public sector. These
efforts were not exceptional, but part of a broader phenomenon during the post-war
period when national planning was a paramount political priority for many newly
independent nation-states. Influenced by the diffusion of an eclectic mix of Keynes-
ianism, Soviet-style communism, and development economics since the 1930s, many
countries, after gaining independence, established state planning committees, indus-
trialization schemes, capital-intensive public infrastructure projects, and forms of
market control. These policies relied on new forms of knowledge and practice both in
engineering-hydroelectricity, dam building, and new agricultural technologies-and
in economics-national statistics, market regulation, theories of growth and capital
accumulation, and technical assistance.
While many studies of the High Dam have emphasized its expression of state-guided
development and the centralization of state power, few have looked beyond the Nas-
serist state to understand the origins of the plan and the early phases of its conception.
Ahmad Shokr is a Ph.D. student in the joint program of the Departments of History and Middle Eastern
and Islamic Studies at New York University.
10 ♦ Arab Studies Journal ♦ Spring 2009
Recent studies of Egypt in the inter-war and post-war periods have begun to excavate
the links between Nasserist etatism and earlier forms of knowledge, institutions, and
state regulation that predated the 1952 revolution and were transmitted through global
movements of expertise. In sketching these connections, which were heavily conditioned
by the experiences of war, colonialism, and economic crisis, scholars are beginning to
show that Nasser's statist economic and social policies were not just a consequence
of post-colonial economic nationalism. Nor did they mark a clean break with earlier
forms of economic and social regulation. Rather, the regulatory character of the new
regime, and its concern with state-led economic development and the provision of social
welfare, grew out of preexisting knowledges, institutions, and practices in domains as
varied as social sciences, economic policy, and state building. 1 Such questions have
been less intently pursued in studies of water and river development.
This article is about changing logics ofriver planning in inter-war and early post-
war Egypt that were embedded in these wider circuits. The actors I deal with-colonial
experts, Egyptian hydrologists and engineers, civil servants, international consultants,
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) executives-are a standard cast who appear in
many existing accounts of hydropolitics and river development. A re-reading of their
works reveals that much of what was written about the Aswan High Dam, in the earli-
est phases of the project's elaboration, represented ways of thinking about rivers and
river development that differed from those that had been prevalent since the tum of
the century. My purpose is to provide a fuller account of the transnational networks of
expertise that helped shape early conceptions of the High Dam project, and in particular
the two forms of knowledge that were most influential: river-basin development and
economic statistics. Both appeared in initial formulations of the High Dam project and
were important in the decision to build the dam. Following the trajectories of these two
forms of knowledge and their convergence in the High Dam project will help delineate
a wider set of transnational linkages underlying Nasserist state expansion, particularly
in the realm of hydraulic policy. These linkages have been absent from most accounts
ofhydropolitics and the Nile River to date.
Beyond
Political
Histories
oftheNile
Much of the existing literature on the Nile has bound together the history of
the river and the history of the nation-state. The Nile has been examined as a cross-
national resource, upon which competing national claims have been made, and thus
has remained, until this day, a source of imminent political conflict. A look through the
recent literature on water scarcity and security in the Middle East reveals this trend. 2
But this is equally true of much scholarly work on the earlier history of the Nile that
treats river control as inextricably linked to Egypt's struggle for political and economic
independence. 3 Such studies emphasize Egypt's vulnerability as a downstream state
that grew with the steady development of summer cultivation and the expansion of
cultivated acreage for cotton, and which became a prime consideration that influenced
different schemes for Nile control in the twentieth century. By the 1950s, two distinct
approaches to deal with the Nile problem had crystallized: one approach that began
earlier in the century, and sought to develop the Nile basin as a single unit, integrating
Shokr ♦ 11
Nile control mechanisms from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea, and another
that sought to control the Nile waters within Egypt's borders. The High Dam proposal's
introduction in the 1950s marked a new vision of the Nile as a nationalized river that
became "the antithesis of the Equatorial Nile Projects and the basin-wide concept that
had dominated discourse and planning in the Ministry of Public Works since the time
of William Garstin." 4
Indeed, Nile control plans in the first half of the twentieth century did advance
different claims about the river's geographical makeup, and the political jurisdictions
within which control over the river should be exercised. Writing in 1947, H. E. Hurst,
a leading authority on hydrology in Egypt and a visionary of the Century Storage
Scheme (explained below), described the Nile as "a single geographic unit" and argued
that "projects for its full development must also form a unity, parts of which form
together." 5 Fearing British plans to colonize the southern Nile valley by splitting the
Sudan from Egypt, many hydraulic experts and nationalist politicians rallied around
the slogan "Unity of the Nile Valley." 6
Limiting our analysis to these geographically centered ways of thinking about the
Nile misses other important transformations in river development plans that had less
to do with the Nile's political boundaries. Were experts also thinking about the Nile
in new ways that cannot be fully explained by national and colonial conflict? To find
an answer requires that we leave aside for a moment debates about basin-wide versus
nationalized river development and think instead about how hydraulic experts conceived
the relationship between water, land, populations, and the economy. Reframing the
question in this fashion moves us away from accounts of the Nile as political history
and asks instead what sorts of projects a river control program could achieve given the
existing technologies, schemes, and ideas that experts had at their disposal. But this
shift of focus certainly does not expunge politics from the story. Rather than looking
at how colonial and national politics influenced different ideas of river development,
I propose to attend to how new forms of hydraulic and economic knowledge shaped
national water management priorities, gave rise to new ways in which water could be
used, and allowed for new political claims to be attached to river control projects.
The Aswan High Dam marked a turning point in thinking about rivers in Egypt,
but not just because it brought river control under full Egyptian jurisdiction. 7 Under
the influence of new global ideas and practices, hydraulic and economic experts,
beginning in the 1940s, came to see the Nile as more than just a supplier of water that
could help Egypt overcome its Malthusian dilemma of overpopulation and resource
underdevelopment. Control of the Nile waters could also spur much more ambitious
projects of economic modernization that could develop multiple sectors of the economy
within a single unified plan and, as a result, raise overall levels of economic growth
and prosperity. It was in this context that experts formulated the Aswan High Dam
proposal and the new political elite took the decision to build the dam.
TheHigh
DamDecision
During the inter-war period, Egypt saw the formation of an industrial bourgeoisie,
composed largely oflandowners, financiers, and entrepreneurs who found it increasingly
profitable to invest capital in new industrial and commercial ventures. They often orga-
nized into separate business coalitions that struggled against each other to secure access
to state resources and protections and to eliminate market competition in the sectors
where they operated. 8 These discrete business groups that vied for control of Egyptian
industry before the revolution were primarily interested in rent-generating industrial
ventures that did not always translate into large-scale national development projects.
As Robert Vitalis argues: "A project of limited local industry building in cooperation
with foreign capital remained the basic development model for approximately the next
four decades, until the mid-l 950s, when the Nasser regime began to undermine ... the
local capitalists that governed the economy." 9 After the revolution, the Free Officers
ushered in a new era of state-led development. One of their first tasks was to subvert
the monopoly system where large Egyptian business groups accumulated great fortunes
through their cross-sectoral holdings (in such domains as textiles, transport, chemicals,
and services ). 10 In the post-revolutionary period, the emerging state, which often feared
local capital more than it did foreign capital, reined in many of these holdings. In
order to replace the old development model that relied on local private investors with
a bureaucratic state as the engine of industrialization in Egypt, the new regime needed
plans that could centralize control over most ofEgypt's resources and bring them under
the wing of the government. Adriano Daninos' proposal was such a plan.
In 1947, Daninos, an Egyptian agronomist and entrepreneur of Greek origin pub-
lished a study in the Bulletin de l'Jnstitut d'Egypte, a periodical issued by the Institut
d' Egypte, with a proposed solution to Egypt's river control problem that would enable
the "complete usage of the water of the Nile basin." 11 He proposed the construction
of another dam at Aswan, in addition to the one built under the British in 1902, as
the best way of utilizing the Nile waters to their full capacity. This proposal, initially
rejected by the Egyptian government, marked the birth of the Aswan High Dam project,
which the Free Officers appropriated after the 1952 revolution and showcased as a
centerpiece of Egyptian nation-building and economic development. Within months
of the Free Officers' coming to power, Daninos presented his proposal to a group of
them and the plan was adopted. 12 What exactly made the High Dam so attractive to
the new regime?
The standard story about the High Dam emphasizes the political underpinnings
of the decision to undertake the project. It was primarily a political decision taken by
a revolutionary regime in defiance of foreign agendas. For the Free Officers, the High
Dam would serve as a symbolic assertion of Egypt's independence and the emerging
state's ability to undertake national development. 13 While this version stresses the
individual actions of the new political elite, and insists that authoritarian regimes like
Nasser's were motivated by ideological imperatives that compromised sound technical
and economic judgment, it does little to explain the complex histories of ideas about
development that captivated the minds of those who helped formulate and implement
the High Dam project.
Another way to explain the High Dam decision is to locate it in a wider historical
context, where a nascent ideology of development was establishing a basis for many
state economic projects in the post-war period, especially in the Third World. Unlike
Shokr ♦ 13
standard political economy accounts, such an approach treats "development" as a dis-

cursive construct and pays closer attention to its historical origins and evolution during
this period. Scholars outside of Middle Eastern studies have been quite attentive to
the global interconnections and transnational forms of knowledge that have given rise
to a distinct development discourse in the middle decades of the twentieth century. 14
Scholars like Frederick Cooper have shown how this discourse, born out of Keynesian
economics, legitimized British and French efforts to promote health, education, labor,
and agricultural reforms in the colonies during the wartime economic crisis of the
1940s, to safeguard the colonies as sources of expanded production. But the develop-
ment discourse survived the demise of colonialism and retained a strong appeal among
national elites and newly independent governments in the post-colonial period, as it did
to their colonial predecessors. 15 It provided a language with which colonial bureaucrats,
nationalist leaders, and international institutions could advance political arguments
about state regulation, economic policy, and social progress. It would also be the basis
of development theories-modernization and dependency theory, for example-in later
decades. The High Dam decision can also be understood in this context, under the
influence of such a powerful ideological framework. Indeed, expanding state power,
centralizing control over resources and expertise, and undertaking massive state-led
development projects were strategies common to many newly independent states in
the Third World. To sanction new trends in state centralization and public investment,
national elites drew on a conceptual paradigm that became the hallmark of develop-
ment discourse: that newly independent societies were composed of populations whose
overall levels of productivity and well-being could be improved by state intervention,
and that the post-colonial state was the best deliverer of development.
Relying on such contextual explanations of economic policy that credit the appeal
of new public projects to a generalized discursive effect can also be problematic, for it
risks overlooking the specific economic and technical arguments that politicians, local
experts, and international consultants made to support the High Dam project, assuming
that these arguments were only reflections of larger discursive frameworks. Rather
than summon something larger, like a development discourse, for example, to explain
the decision to build the dam, I propose to move in the opposite direction-back to the
dam itself-in an attempt to understand the various forces that combined to make it
a favorable development project. Going back to the Dam, as I propose, by no means
locks us in the particularities of a single site, denying us access to external factors
that helped shape the project. The proposal to build the High Dam was enmeshed in
a network of relationships to other projects, ideas, and technologies that, as we will
see, had a significant influence. Before examining a specific set of specialized texts
on the High Dam, a brief account of river control debates in the earlier part of the
century is necessary to illustrate how the Nile was thought about prior to the conceptual
transformations of the 1940s, and will provide some background to better understand
the significance of new forms of knowledge in river basin development and economic
statistics that became vital to early elaborations of the High Dam project.
14 ♦ Arab Studies Journal ♦ Sprini 2009
TheNile:TheHydrology
ofa River
The Nile river basin has been a force, among other natural and human factors,
shaping Egypt's agricultural geography (where and how much land people can cul-
tivate) for as long as farming has existed along its riverbanks. Given the dearth of
annual rainfall, the seasonal flood, which peaked in August and September, sustained
Egyptian agriculture for centuries. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, farmers
relied on the annual floodwaters to grow their crops in what was known as the basin
irrigation system. This was a decentralized system of water management operating on
the level ofindividual villages. The system worked as follows: Land would be divided
into basins between 1,000 and 40,000 acres with a longitudinal bank constructed as
near to the river as possible. 16 During flood season, the bank sluices would allow the
rising water into these basins and hold it for up to two months before it drained back
into the river with the receding floodwaters. By the nineteenth century, reliance on
the annual flood had become insufficient for a country that was rapidly expanding its
agricultural output. Agricultural modernization required irrigation techniques to expand
the amount of cultivated land and increase output, particularly of cash crops like cotton
and other staples. The problem with basin irrigation was that much land would remain
fallow between the time of harvesting (March-April) and the next flood, as there was
insufficient water for vast summer cropping. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century,
under Mehmet Ali, that problem was addressed by switching from basin to perennial
irrigation, a new system that regulated floodwaters through a network of canals and
barrages to provide water for multi-crop irrigation all year round.
Perennial irrigation enabled the vast expansion of cotton cultivation for cash crops,
one of the largest economic transformations in the history of the region. The idea behind
it was simple: Instead ofrelying on irrigation by flooding, smaller quantities of water,
impounded behind a series of small barrages, would run through canals onto the land
at regular intervals of two to three weeks all year round. The earliest experiments
with this idea, predating the massive irrigation projects of the late nineteenth century,
involved various lift techniques used by farmers to transport water from the river into
a depression, where it remained after the flood drained away. Large-scale perennial
irrigation developed under Mehmet Ali with the construction of canals and barrages
beginning in the early 1820s. This allowed for multiple crops to be grown year-round,
including during the summer season. To improve year-round irrigation, however, more
water had to be stored and released according to seasonal agricultural needs. A large
reservoir, in addition to the smaller barrages that had been storing excess floodwater
until the end of the nineteenth century, had to be created to serve this purpose. The first
Aswan Dam, built under the British in 1902, had a water storage capacity of one billion
cubic meters behind its walls (before the dam was heightened decades later). 17
While the canals and regulators enabled a spatial redistribution of water to many
different areas that previously relied on the flood, the Aswan Dam and the barrages
enabled a redistribution of water over the course of the year, by holding excess water
in a reservoir that could then be used for summer cropping. 18 By the mid-twentieth
century, four fifths of cultivated land in Egypt had been converted to this system of
perennial irrigation. 19 But the dam only held 6 percent of the average annual discharge
Shokr ♦ 15
of the Nile while the other barrages held up to 12 percent. 20 The system was never
designed to store the entire year's floodwaters, but rather to store enough water to
meet the requirements of summer cropping while the remaining floodwaters, about 80
percent of the annual discharge, were lost to sea. In addition to the tremendous water
losses to sea, the level ofNile discharge was never steady from year to year. The vari-
ability in annual water discharge fluctuated wildly. This meant that regardless of how
floodwaters from any single year were distributed over different seasons, farmers still
faced the danger of a low flood year where there was insufficient water for agricul-
ture, or a high flood year where most of the water was unretainable and therefore lost
to the sea. The Aswan Dam did not alter the fact that annual flood levels could vary
drastically. Thus, the outstanding problem for irrigation engineers at the tum of the
century was how to control the discharge of the Nile, not just on a seasonal basis, but
on an over-year basis as well. 21
By mid-century, Egypt's annual waterneeds stabilized between fifty-five and sixty-
three billion cubic meters. 22 The average annual discharge of the Nile was eight-four
billion cubic meters, with a standard deviation of about twenty billion cubic meters
annually, leaving the possibility oflean or abundant flood years open to chance. 23 The
solution to this problem, proposed by experts since the beginning of the century, was
to store the annual difference between real needs and total discharge during high years
in a series of reservoirs that could then be used to offset the water deficit during low
years. What the Aswan Dam had achieved on a seasonal basis was now to be carried
out on an over-year basis. The Aswan reservoir did not have such a storage capacity,
so engineers and hydraulic experts worked beginning in the early twentieth century to
design a system that could store more water over a longer period of time.
Most irrigation experts believed in the necessity of storing water beyond the
needs of one year. William Willcocks, a British civil engineer and architect of the first
dam, had written as early as 1905 that "there will never be any stable development of
a tract of country depending on irrigation unless all the possibilities of drought and
deficiency are put beyond the power ofrecurrence." 24 In subsequent decades, experts
like Sir Murdoch Macdonald of the Anglo-Egyptian Union in Cairo and H. E. Hurst
of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works worked tirelessly to calculate Egypt's total
water needs and came to the similar conclusion that a massive new plan had to be
designed to completely control all the waters of the flood. 25 They began formulating a
multi-faceted plan-known as the Century Storage Scheme-that could achieve this
objective. 26 The basic idea was to manage the Nile discharge through a network of
dams, regulators, and reservoirs (in addition to the original dam at Aswan) located at
key points along the Nile, the largest reservoir of them all being Lake Victoria bordered
by Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. Implementing such a plan would eliminate the flood
and store all the excess waters from high-flood years in this network of control and
storage mechanisms. The study of the Nile had occupied the attention of many eminent
engineers-like William Willcocks, William Garstin, and Henry Lyons-since the late
nineteenth century. 27 But it was Murdoch Macdonald's Nile Control, published for the
Ministry of Public Works in 1920, that offered the first comprehensive scheme for Nile
projects and laid the basic ideas for the Century Storage Scheme. Macdonald, a British
consulting civil engineer, proposed a plan that would include a flood control barrage at
Nag' Hammadi, a dam at JabalAwliya' to store summer water for Egypt, and a dam at
Sinnar to meet the water needs of Sudanese cotton cultivation. These three phases of
his plan would eventually be followed by the construction of reservoir on the Upper
Blue Nile, a dam at Lake Albert, and a channel in the Sudd region of the Upper White
Nile. Engineers worked on developing variants of this plan throughout the next few
decades but encountered a series of technical and political problems along the way.28
Macdonald's proposal came under intense criticism from British experts, like William
Willcocks, who instead favored a second heightening of the Aswan Dam, and Egyptian
nationalists who were suspicious of British attempts to link Egypt's irrigation needs
to water control projects outside the country's borders. 29 For these and other reasons,
British and Egyptian hydraulic plans during the inter-war period remained stalled and
achieved nothing as transformative in scale as the construction of the Aswan Dam.
For the purposes of this narrative, what matters most is the way Macdonald and other
experts conceived of Egypt's Nile problem in this period. How did they think about
the river's potential and what kinds of problems was its control meant to solve?
Egypt's
Malthusian
Dilemma
In his Nile Control, Murdoch Macdonald characterized Egypt's basic problem, to
which irrigation experts had to respond in their various water management proposals,
as an imbalance between the available areas of cultivation and the needs of a grow-
ing population. If the crisis, in crude Malthusian terms, was one of too many people
outstripping the resources at their disposal, the solution lay in the effective use of
Egypt's water to supply to expand the country's cultivated area at a rate equivalent to
that of its growing population. How did Macdonald go about calculating the specif-
ics of this crisis and what sorts of figures did he use? His methodology was simple.
Macdonald took the rate of population increase at the time, estimated to be 200,000
people per year, and argued that expansion must proceed at an equivalent rate until
the maximum possible cultivated surface area in Egypt was reached. 30 Like many after
him, Macdonald showed that out of roughly seven million feddans that were available
for cultivation in Egypt, only five million were under cultivation. The goal of any river
control project would be to expand cultivation to the remaining two million feddans
by making available the necessary water supply. Hence, Macdonald's main problem
concerned physical resources, namely people and land. The problem was made leg-
ible to him through a set of statistics representing demography and cultivated surface
area.
There was another group of social scientists concerned with this race between
people and agricultural land, yet they approached it from the angle of controlling popu-
lation growth rather than expanding Egypt's resource base. In the mid-1930s, during
a time of agrarian crisis, which helped bring to light the extent of rural poverty, social
scientists developed new discourses and practices of population control that aimed at
reforming the countryside and raising the living standard of Egypt's peasants, by far
the majority of the population at the time. As Omnia El Shakry has argued, population
discourse during the inter-war period also served to displace public discussion of the
Shokr ♦ 17
agrarian crisis by avoiding questions of income and land distribution, instead framing
rural poverty in terms of natural factors like land scarcity and overpopulation. 31 The
first full-length study of population control was published in 1936 by Wendel Cleland,
an American psychologist teaching at the American University of Cairo, under the title
The Population Problem in Egypt. 32
Cleland 's study occupied a seminal status for social scientists engaged in subsequent
population debates, as did Macdonald's Nile Control for irrigation experts formulating
river control plans. Like irrigation experts, Cleland saw in Egypt an ongoing struggle
between population growth and the development of natural resources, and he warned
of an impending social and economic crisis if this struggle was not resolved. While
irrigation experts were proposing schemes to increase the amount of cultivated surface
area to solve this problem, Cleland was less optimistic. Relying on population density
statistics in the countryside, Cleland argued that new irrigation works were incapable
of expanding cultivation to a level necessary to satisfy the rate of population growth.
Given Egypt's high rural population density, efforts at improving cultivated acreage per
capita were insufficient to raise the standard of living; the only solution was popula-
tion control. 33 Cleland's method for calculating overpopulation was also very simple.
Again, based on statistics of population and cultivated acreage, he showed that it was
impossible in Egypt to increase per capita acreage; the best that irrigation works could
aim for in the future was to prevent greater losses. 34 Instead of comparing aggregate
rates of population growth and cultivated land expansion the way Macdonald did,
Cleland relied on per capita statistics to make an argument primarily about population
density. Both men, however, relied mainly on statistics about demography and culti-
vated surface area to illustrate Egypt's unfolding crisis. Water supply was a resource
the efficient use of which would allow Egypt to overcome this crisis and balance its
available resources with the needs of a growing population.
Surely, there were many political and economic interests at stake in the expansion
of cultivation that were not driven by the Malthusian concerns that belonged mainly
to the realm of hydraulic and social scientific expertise. River planning affected many
social groups who had other stakes in expanded irrigation and probably viewed river
control projects much differently. The expansion of canals and barrages, since the
nineteenth century, through much of what is now the Delta brought tremendous wealth
to those who owned land that was endowed with value once irrigated. Colonial and
local Egyptian elites profited greatly from the expansion of cultivation, especially those
producing Egypt's most famous fiber, long-staple cotton. From the late nineteenth cen-
tury until World War I, profits from increased agricultural production (partly a result of
expanded irrigation) went almost entirely to cotton growers, especially landowners. 35
Furthermore, large landowners, who by 1952 numbered less than 2,000 estate hold-
ers, were an important group within Egypt's ruling elite and played a significant role
in party politics and government policy for much of the inter-war and early post-war
periods. 36 Small and landless farmers were most directly affected by new river manipu-
lation projects, and probably had different perspectives on these transitions from those
of ministry officials and expatriate water experts. But the reports of irrigation experts
and the specific claims they made about the expansion of cultivation in the twentieth
century relied largely on arguments I have outlined above. By the 1940s two new forms
of knowledge in river basin development and economic statistics changed the way
experts conceived of water management and the kinds of political claims that could
be attached to river development programs like the High Dam. The impact of both on
arguments in favor of building the High Dam needs to be examined more closely.
Controlling
theNileFlood:
When
Experts
Collide
Until the late 1940s, Adriano Daninos was known as one of the earliest advocates
of industrialization by hydroelectric power, proposing in 1912 to build a power sta-
tion at the site of the first Aswan Dam. 37 By 1947, Dani nos had developed a plan that
was to become the High Dam project (although it was never called that until years
later). He argued that, to utilize the water of the Nile to its full potential, it would be
necessary to build a new reservoir at Aswan with the capacity to hold 160 billion cubic
meters of water. 38 Achieving this required the construction of a new dam, just a few
kilometers south of the original Aswan Dam, that would create a massive reservoir
behind it capable of holding all the annual floodwaters for two consecutive years.
Daninos published his study, in part, as a response to those who advocated a "Unity of
the Nile" solution to Egypt's water problem. According to John Waterbury, Daninos'
1947 proposal marked a transitional moment in Egyptian hydropolitics whereby "a
series of relatively small projects was thus scrapped in favor of one giant project, but
the fundamental goals were the same: over-year storage and adequate summer water
for Egypt's commercial agriculture." 39 But Daninos was not just proposing a response
to the same old problem of over-year storage that hydraulic experts had been dealing
with for decades. His vision for the dam was more ambitious and reflected a new
approach to river development.
Daninos introduced his study by redefining the problem confronting hydraulic
experts with regards to Nile regulation. He asserted that previous research had sought
the best way to regulate water supply so as to assure Egypt the maximum cultivable
land surface, but had overlooked studies on river management that would permit the
solution of other river-related problems beyond just water supply. (He is likely to have
been referring to studies about river control in the Tennessee Valley in the United States
and the Massif Centrale in France, a connection that will be discussed below.) 40 In
response to this perceived oversight, Daninos proposed a far-reaching plan to build a
massive new dam with wide-ranging functions: It would not only retain floodwater lost
to sea by storing it all in a massive reservoir, but it would also provide hydroelectricity
to power chemical factories for the production of nitrogen fertilizers and steel factories
to accelerate the country's industrialization, and help improve navigation in the Nile
river. 41 Put simply, he was n,ot merely interested in controlling the water supply to
expand cultivation, but in using river control mechanisms to undertake a much larger
economic transformation. He argued that his scheme would revolutionize irrigation,
agriculture, and industry, and take the country down a path of economic development
to an apogee never before attained. 42 Breaking with earlier approaches to hydroelec-
tric power and irrigation that dealt with each of these as separate issues, Daninos saw
himself to be unifying these problems under one single solution. 43
Shokr ♦ 19
Whereas Daninos' predecessors saw the Nile as a naturally continuous entity that
had to be developed as a whole, Daninos thought that developing the Nile required
breaking this continuity. His conviction was partly based on his assessment that it was
considerably advantageous to pursue a project within the defined borders of a single
country. Unlike the Century Storage Scheme that required appropriate mechanisms
to mediate between all the countries involved, the High Dam would not require such
levels of cooperation. Being solely within Egypt's borders meant the government
would have full control over all aspects of the project. 44 His predecessors dismissed
the "one dam" idea and projected that the resulting reservoir would have high rates of
evaporation, and therefore waste a great deal of water, an undesirable outcome from a
basin perspective. 45 There was also an expert consensus, at that point, against the idea
of a solely Egyptian solution, as early advocates of Century Storage had dismissed
the possibility that a successful project could be kept under Egyptian sovereignty. In
1920, amidst engineering efforts to improve flood control by heightening the first
dam, Murdoch Macdonald wrote that "if one single work could meet all these require-
ments, naturally it ought to be undertaken at once, but unfortunately there is no such
simple solution available." 46 Egypt had to rely on a network of smaller projects both
inside and outside its borders. Daninos' predecessors narrowed the scope of the Nile
problem down to questions of water storage, irrigation, and agricultural expansion,
but expanded the geographical boundaries of its solution. Daninos, on the other hand,
redefined the Nile problem as a broader issue of multi-sectoral economic moderniza-
tion but advocated a solution within defined national borders and under the control of
one sovereign state. It was precisely this broadening of his conception ofriver devel-
opment-to include flood control, irrigation, hydropower, and navigation-that has
been missed by most studies of Nile hydropolitics. Such a solution was not without
its precedents. Daninos was influenced by similar attempts at resource management
implemented outside of Egypt.
ATVAintheNileValley
The High Dam was an Egyptian nationalist development project with extra-
Egyptian origins. In the years preceding the publication of his study, Daninos toured
various river management sites in Europe and the United States, particularly in the
Tennessee Valley and the Massif Centrale. When he returned to Egypt and published
his study, Daninos expressed admiration for the TVA and praised President Franklin D.
Roosevelt as the "great apostle of social progress who has demonstrated to the world
what can be obtained by the intense development of a country's natural resources." 47
What he found so convincing about the latter project, along with other such projects
in India and China, was that they reversed the prevailing wisdom on dams by fulfilling
multiple purposes (buts multiples): regulating water distribution, establishing flood
control, generating hydropower, and permitting easier river navigation. 48
This approach to resource management would not have been unfamiliar to anyone
working with the TVA in this period. 49 The TVA was founded on a vision that sought to
group such disparate problems under the mantle of one development project. Created
in 1933 through an act of Congress under President Roosevelt, the TVA was entrusted
with the "duty of constantly studying the whole situation presented by the Tennessee
River Valley, and the adjoining territory, with the view of encouraging and guiding
the orderly and balanced development of the diverse and rich resources of that sec-
tion. "50 The idea of unified and balanced development had a longer history; its basic
principles were articulated as early as 1907 when the future of natural resources in
the United States, threatened by soil erosion, deforestation, farm abandonment, and
mineral depletion, was brought to the president's attention. Roosevelt responded by
appointing a committee to assess the state of the country's rivers and streams, and a year
later he broadened the scope of this effort by establishing the National Conservation
Commission (NCC) to survey all the nation's resources. 51 In 1908, the NCC produced
a 1,800-page report with a detailed inventory of all the country's resources, including
its rivers, soils, forests, and minerals. On the question of river control it stated that a
river ought to be developed to provide for "all the uses of the waters and the benefits
to be derived from their control," including water supply, flood control, navigability,
and power. 52 A river was not just a supplier of water for agriculture. It was the locus
from which many other technical and economic activities stemmed and upon which a
modem development regime would rely. The basic principles of the TVA evolved from
the "reflective observations, studies, and experience of the scientists and the informed
concern of laymen" that launched the conservation movement. 53 In 1907, President
Roosevelt's chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, who soon became chairman of the NCC,
was struck by a new concept of development that unified problems of forestation,
fisheries, soil, coal and minerals. Writing about this moment many years later, Pinchot
described his vision of development as follows:
Suddenly, the idea flashed through my head that there was a basic unity in this com-
plication-that the relation of one resource to another was not the end of the story.
Here were no longer a lot of different, independent, and often antagonistic questions,
each on its own separate little island, as we had been in the habit of thinking. In place
of them, here was one single question with many parts. 54
Pinchot was stating the basic principles of the TVA and, to an extent, the High Dam
as Daninos later conceived it.
This new approach of developing resources relationally under a unified develop-
ment project, and which was not restricted to rivers, traveled through experts around the
world who were learning from and prescribing solutions to their mutual economic and
technical problems. By the outbreak of World War II, TVA executives in alliance with
local political forces began to limit the Authority's broad mandate for regional plan-
ning and the TVA became focused primarily on supplying electricity for the aluminum
and, later, the nuclear industry. 55 Its original vision of comprehensive development,
however, would endure in the post-war period and spread to many parts of the world.
By the 1950s, a burgeoning literature on TVA-style river development programs had
matured, taking as its prime concern the relationship between river basin development
and economic growth. At a 1957 symposium at the Duke University School of Law, a
group of leading experts in river basin development gathered to reflect on what they
called "integrated river basin development for multiple purposes" and to evaluate its
Shokr ♦ 21
related legal, economic, and technical consequences. These experts included geogra-
phers, economists, and engineers with previous experience in water works and national
resource planning in the United States. In his introduction to the symposium, Gilbert
White, an American geographer and former member of the National Resources Planning
Board, laid down the basic ideas of integrated river basin development. Citing Egypt
and India as examples, White argued that, with few exceptions, irrigation engineers
in these places had long felt warranted in putting together single projects for single
purposes. 56 In the twentieth century, beginning with projects like the Hoover Dam,
engineers in the United States began to devise water storage projects that would serve
multiple purposes and promote general economic prosperity under a unified adminis-
tration. By mid-century there were nearly a dozen major river basin programs in the
United States, India, China, Japan, Morocco, France, Iraq, and the Soviet Union that
were based on the integrated development model. 57
The TVA example became closely connected with development programs offered
by the United States to many parts of the Third World in the post-war period. The 1950s
saw enhanced American efforts to counter Soviet influence in the decolonizing world
by providing newly independent governments with financial aid, technical knowledge,
and expertise. David Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp, two former chairmen of the TVA
in the 1940s, saw in the Authority an effective development model for a decolonizing
world. Together, they became active in promoting integrated development around
the world. The two men founded The Development and Resources Corporation (D
& R), a private consulting firm that operated from 1955 to 1979 and offered regional
economic development services to developing countries in Asia and Latin America.
In coordination with U.S. post-war technical assistance programs, these men served
as advisors for water resource development projects in Iran, Columbia, Puerto Rico,
and SoutheastAsia. 58 By the early 1960s several ofthem became involved in a U.N.
sponsored multi-purpose development project on the Mekong River to serve Cambodia,
Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand. To secure the support of foreign expertise and
government funding, the United Nations summoned a roll call of familiar names to
help with the project: Gilbert White headed one of the first studies of the project with
Ford Foundation money, Arthur E. Goldschmidt worked to secure U.S. government
support for the project, and David Lilienthal brought the financial resources ofD & R
to the research and planning aspects of the project. 59 The overseas involvement of these
TVA experts in Third World development projects continued to proliferate throughout
this period until the demise of the TVA development model in the early 1970s. 60
Although their presence in Egypt was minimal, the development model espoused
by the NCC and later by the top executives of the TVA inspired Daninos' original
proposal and was the basis of his argument for the High Dam. This conception of
multi-purpose river development survived the 1952 revolution, and the Free Offi-
cers relied on this model to justify the building of the High Dam. Upon his return
to Egypt, Daninos persisted in advocating for his plan, criticizing everyone around
him, in political office or the public service, who failed to be amazed by the project's
potential. He continued to develop his scheme in the late 1940s, in collaboration with
international consultants and engineers, but the government did not take it seriously
until after the revolution. 61 Shortly after 1952, the Free Officers set up a Permanent
Council for the Development of National Production (PCDNP) that quickly became
the forum in which major debates and decisions on economic policy were made in the
early years of the revolution. 62 In 1954, the new government decided to undertake the
High Dam project and the PCDNP produced its first report on the proposal. Among the
first observations noted in this report was that economic development policy in Egypt
during the previous decades operated on the view that agriculture and industry were
two separate problems. What was needed, according to the report, was an inclusive
solution appropriate for the exigencies of agriculture and industry in the long-term
future. 63 Again, the language of multi-purpose development and the possibility of its
achievement through one massive project were vital in the new regime's perception
of why the High Dam was so important to economic development.
Concerns about the use of water for farming, power generation, and navigation were
not new; various state agencies, business groups, and professional bodies had articulated
such ideas for a long time. But their formulation within one comprehensive development
plan that could be achieved by the construction of a single water control project, like
a dam, was new.64 This reconfiguration of economic projects-agricultural, industrial,
and commercial-around a centralized water control system was an archetype of what
James Scott has called "high-modernist" visioning, that required technocratic planning
from above. 65 The idea of controlling water to achieve comprehensive development
captivated the imaginations of state officials as well as private individuals like Daninos.
This new form ofriver basin knowledge was accompanied by important developments
in economic statistics that also marked early variations of the High Dam proposal, and
left a considerable impact on the project's initial assessments.
Income
ofNational
TheBackbone
In the mid-l 950s, two of the first reports in favor of the High Dam were published:
the World Bank's 1955 report on economic development in Egypt and the PCDNP's
1954 report on the High Dam project. In 1954 the new government decided to take
on the High Dam project and, by the next year, Cairo had secured the agreement of
the World Bank to help fund it. Interestingly, both reports attributed to the High Dam
the capacity to do something that was hardly mentioned in previous water reports: It
would increase both the agricultural and the industrial output of Egypt, thus raising
the country's national income. 66 By the next decade, this argument had become com-
monplace in much of the government-produced literature on the High Dam, whether
professional studies or propaganda materials. The High Dam Authority, for instance,
in a 1964 pamphlet entitled al-Sadd al- 'Ali introduced the project as follows: "The
High Dam project is considered the backbone for the economic development plan to
double the national income of the Arab Republic ofEgypt." 67 This argument was dif-
ferent than earlier arguments about the merits ofriver control. By defining the goal of
the High Dam in terms of improving national income (particularly the agricultural and
industrial components of that income), supporters of the dam were in a sense revers-
ing earlier arguments about water supply and agriculture; the expansion of cultivated
surface area and income generation from agriculture, previously seen as problems
Shokr ♦ 23
to be solved by improved irrigation in order to support a growing population, were

now seen as a solution to a bigger problem of raising national income. Where did this
concern with national income come from?
Until the mid- l 940s, few serious attempts were made to calculate the national
income of the country. Income, production, and price estimates from principal crops
had existed for many decades. Since the nineteenth century, various private bodies,
like trading companies and banking houses, recorded these estimates, which were
vital to the functioning of institutions such as the futures market in Alexandria. 68
Before 1914, only two exhaustive attempts had been made to calculate the total value
of Egypt's agricultural production, one estimate by William Willcocks in 1895 and
another by Comte Cressaty, the founder of Banque Hypothecaire Franco-Egyptienne,
in 1910. These and other early attempts that followed relied on information about area
under cultivation by main crops and estimated harvest volumes, and multiplied these
figures by average export prices, obtained from the Customs Administration. 69 While
regular crop estimates and estimates from crop areas and yield per feddan had long
been available, only by the 1940s did the Ministry of Agriculture commence making
estimates of agricultural income.
The 1940s also witnessed several attempts to measure Egypt's national income,
based on increasingly available statistics on consumption, income, savings, and invest-
ment. Re Iying on figures from the Sta tis tique A nnuaire and the National Bank ofE gypt' s
Economic Bulletin (that began publication in 1948), several economists had made ten-
tative estimates of national income by the late 1940s. The establishment of the U .N. 's
Department ofEcopomic Affairs in the post-war period also offered another source of
statistical production. Various estimates of national income, by people like Mahmoud
Anise, Munir Habashi, and 'Abd al-Mun'im al-Shafi'i were in circulation by the early
1950s. 70 Mahmoud Anise published the first systematic study, which was commissioned
by the Egyptian Ministry of Finance, in the Khedival Society for Political Economy's
monthly journal L 'Egypte Contemporaine and as a free-standing monograph in 1950.
The Ministry of Finance sent Anise to England in 1944 to complete a dissertation on
national income, especially after the Middle East Financial Conference of 1944 had
urged "improvements in the organization and collection of statistics relating to the
volume and composition of the national income and output and recommending the
study of methods of national income estimation in England and the United States." 71
Anise's' estimate covered the years between 1937 and 1945 and his approach was
based on calculations of income, output, and expenditure for those years.
It would be a mistake to understand the difference between national income statis-
tics and earlier methods of accounting as simply a difference between statistics gener-
ated by the private sector versus the state. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, national
income statistics were closely bound with another social-scientific breakthrough in this
period: the making of the economy as an object ofpolitics. 72 Mitchell argues that the
economy-meaning a distinct sphere containing the sum total of productive, consump-
tive, and distributive activities within a national space--emerged as an object of politics
in the twentieth century. New forms of measurement and calculation, including the
cadastral map, national currency, private property, joint stock companies, and national
statistics, made such an object possible. The distinctive feature of this new object was
that it was measured not by material wealth-in the form ofland, agriculture, factories,
and related processes of settlement, cultivation, and production-but by the circulation
of money within a defined geographical area. It was an object grounded in the act of
exchange, not the physicality of material resources. Hence, "in its most basic form,
the economy was conceived as the sum of every occasion on which money changed
hands. " 73 National income statistics, which became a ubiquitous indicator of economic
performance, represented the circulation of money, not physical resources like harvest
volumes and cultivated surface areas. 74 This was a conceptual breakthrough because
of what these statistics counted, not just who did the counting.
TheEconomic
River?
Multi-purpose development and national accounting changed the way that experts
rationalized river planning. What begins to appear in the 1950s is a new logic of river
control that takes as its goal not just the development of physical resources-land,
crops, human bodies-but also "the economy" as a location-less sphere of money
exchange. This new logic did not mark a clear rupture with older Malthusian concerns,
but rather a shift in calculating the productivity of rivers, land, and agricultural output,
and was manifested primarily in the work of experts who produced economic feasibility
and appraisal studies about the High Dam. Together, multi-purpose development and
national income statistics allowed for new ways of measuring a river project's contri-
bution to the national economy, against the benefits of other possible public projects.
Cost-benefit analysis, for instance, became a prevalent method used by governments
to assess the desirability of a public works project, and would not have been possible
without the influence of these two forms of knowledge. Some of the earliest attempts
at economic appraisals that relied on cost-benefit analysis were applied to the High
Dam. In 1965, the National Bank of Egypt published a special study on the economics
of water projects evaluation, using this methodology to assess the impact of the High
Dam on the national economy, and its relative opportunity costs. The study began by
asserting the importance of the High Dam to Egypt's national economy: "The impact
ofa project on the rest of the national economy depends very much on the state of the
economy at the time. In an economy on the verge of transformation no other single
project could be conceived to have such a formidable impact on the UAR such as the
High Dam." 75 The project's benefits were assessed in four areas: agriculture, power,
flood control, and navigation. The impact of the Dam on each area was measured in
total Egyptian pounds and weighed against the financial costs of the Dam, including
construction, indemnities to the Sudan, land reclamation, power costs, and the reclama-
tion of Nubian monuments. The benefit-cost ratio was found to be 3.1: 1. The impact
of multi-purpose development and output-income statistics on cost-benefit analysis is
difficult to overestimate. The division of the project's benefits follows, almost exactly,
the way the architects of the TVA and Adriano Daninos imagined the multiple effects
that a dam could have on farming, power generation, flood protection, and navigation.
Similarly, output-income statistics were essential to measuring the Dam's impact, in
Egyptian pounds, on these areas. Under new forms of economic rationality, like cost-
Shokr ♦ 25
benefit analysis, a cubic meter of water impounded behind a dam was convertible to x
amount of agricultural income, y kilowatts of power, z shipping costs for navigation,
and so on, establishing a basis of commensurability between water and these vari-
ous sectors of economic activity. All of these conversions were measured in national
currency, and their sum total was the High Dam's contribution to national income.
Agriculture, industry, and commerce were all tied in some way to Egypt's water supply.
Water became a fuel that could power an economy.
Much of the government's literature on the dam replicated the cost-benefit model of
project assessment, tying river control projects permanently to prospects for economic
growth. Most publications on the topic listed the benefits of the High Dam as enabling
the government to undertake land reclamation, generate power, protect farmers against
floods, and permit easier navigation, stressing the impact of all these changes on the
country's national income. 76 With the use of such models to calculate the desirability
of a public works project and the opportunity cost of undertaking other projects, dam
construction became sanctioned by the logic of state investment in economic growth
and could be justified as economically rational behavior.
But concerns with economic growth and national income were not common across
all domains of state policy and did not influence thinking behind every government
initiative under Nasser. Economic and social policymakers drew on other discourses
as well that were not always underpinned by these new concerns. Population growth
continued to be deemed a problem requiring government intervention by Nasser's
regime, which emphasized the importance of family planning to social welfare.
Concerns about demography persist until the present in much Egyptian development
discourse. 77 These concerns were not always seen through the lens of"the economy,"
but, as El Shakry has shown, were also made legible through statistics on population
trends, health, education, and welfare.
Even among experts who studied the High Dam-economists, hydrologists,
international consultants for the World Bank-the issues of overpopulation and
land cultivation persisted. Reports on the High Dam continued to portray Egypt's
development predicament as a struggle between cultivated land and population. But
while this image persisted, it also, in many cases, became incorporated into questions
of economic growth. The World Bank's 1955 report contained a section on Egypt's
population problem, characterizing it as follows: "With the more rapid growth in
population anticipated for the future, the question is posed whether and to what extent
production and income can continue to k"ep pace with the increase in population." 78
The main question for the authors of the report was not just population density on a
narrow land. It was also about production and consumption possibilities of a growing
population and a scarce resource base. Population was understood not just as a matter
of bodies, but as an aggregate level of consumption, and land was not just cultivated
acreage, it was an aggregate level of agricultural production. 79 The National Bank's
study also used figures of projected cultivation expansion to make predictions about
corresponding rises in national income. While experts developed new ways of thinking
about and measuring economic growth in relation to water management, the idea of"the
economy" did not establish an uncontested hegemony in the realm of river policymak-
ing. Older arguments and understandings about the problems that river development
was meant to solve did not disappear. The interaction between these logics helped
establish the basic terms of debate and policymaking in this period and set the agenda
(in addition to geopolitical concerns, of course) for public and professional discussion
about the High Dam project.
TheHighDamDecision
Revisited
Professional discussions about the High Dam involved a great deal of knowledge
production by civil servants and independent experts, who took part in state-appointed
committees, government-commissioned reports, consultations with foreign experts,
and publications for various professional journals, which began years before the 1952
revolution. If we consider this expertise more seriously, what can we make of all this
activity? Unlike standard political economy accounts that emphasize the High Dam's
embodiment of broader trends in state expansion and centralization that motivated
political elites in authoritarian post-colonial regimes, I have tried, in this account, to
avoid any tendencies towards authoritarian exceptionalism (by which I mean reading
the High Dam decision as a symptom of the Egyptian state's authoritarian character).
Rather, the appeal of the High Dam can be read as part of a wider set of influential
ideas and practices that were common to many industrialized and developing countries
alike. The expertise around the High Dam project was not just under the monopoly
of the state; it was enmeshed in broader transnational linkages that had histories pre-
dating the revolution, and reflected new kinds of global knowledge in multi-purpose
development and national accounting. In considering this expertise more closely, I have
attempted, in broad terms, to examine the forms of knowledge, methods of calculation,
and economic/technical arguments that were used to support the building of the High
Dam and show how these differed from earlier twentieth-century arguments about
river control and water supply. In this regard, my account suggests an alternative way
of thinking about the Free Officers' decision to build the High Dam. This decision
was not just motivated by the project's geopolitical underpinnings-the perceived
need to stand up to great powers and establish de facto sovereignty over the entirety
of the Nile's flow-or by ideologies of state power, but was the result of a much more
complex movement of knowledge, ideas, and technical practices that involved experts
as well as politicians, Egyptians as well as non-Egyptians, whose combined activities
worked to set up the High Dam as a compelling development project. Without the
work of experts-like Daninos, Anise, the National Bank of Egypt, the members of
the PCNDP, and World Bank economists-the project would have been inconceivable.
Just as, in the nineteenth century, currency meters, water tanks, and maps enabled an
image of the Nile as a single basin with an aggregate water supply for the British to
regulate, in the twentieth century, techniques like national accounting and schemes for
multi-purpose development allowed for the Nile to be conceived as a resource for the
economy and placed at the center of Nasser's economic development project.
But it would also be misleading to understand the work of these experts simply
as effects of a larger discursive force. Experts like Anise who traveled abroad to learn
national accounting, or Daninos who marveled at what he saw being carried out in
Shokr ♦ 27
the Tennessee Valley and the Massif Centrale, were agents through which new forms
of knowledge and practice, in river basin development and economic statistics, were
transmitted. The specifics of their arguments deserve to be analyzed on their own
terms. The challenge is to account for the political effects of new forms of economic
and technical expertise without attributing their force to larger structures, such as dis-
courses for example, neglecting the details that make new technologies, schemes, and
projects politically appealing. An analysis that looks at Third World post-war economic
policies within the global conjuncture of new technical practices in economics and
engineering, conceptual transformations in resource and economic management, ideas
of development and progress, and changing political imperatives of newly independent
states is a promising endeavor that opens new avenues of inquiry into post-colonial
regimes and offers new perspectives on the 1952 revolution and Nasser's post-revo-
lutionary Egypt.
ENDNOTES
1 Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects a/Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Steven Heydemann and Robert Vitalis, "War, Keynesianism,
and Colonialism: Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East," in Steven Heydemann,
ed., War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2000); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
2 Mostafa Dolatyar and Tim S. Gray, "The Politics of Water Scarcity in the Middle East," Environmental
Politics 9, no. 3 (2000); Daniel Hillel, Rivers of Eden: The Struggle for Water and the Quest for Peace in
the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
1 John Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979); Terje
Tvedt, The River Nile in the Age of the British (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006). Tvedt
offers a much richer account of the history of the Nile and the politics of water control, especially in his
section on the social construction of the Nile river basin and its centrality to British imperial thinking, and
with his close attention to the role of several imperial players in East Africa, including the British, the
Germans, the Italians, and, later, the Americans.
4 Tvedt, 261.
5 H. E. Hurst, The Nile (London: Constable Publishers, 1957), 281.

6 See Waterbury, 48 and "The Unity of the Nile Valley," Majallat al-Muhandisin 5-6 (May/June 1947), 5.
7 There are presently two dams at Aswan, one built under the British between 1899 and 1902 and the other
built after the revolution between 1964 and 1970. They are commonly referred to respectively as the Aswan
Dam and the High Dam or the Aswan High Dam. I will be referring to them as such in this paper.
8 Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).

9 Ibid., 17.
10 Ibid., 197.
11 Adriano Daninos, "L'Utilisation integrate des eaux du basin du Nil," Bulletin de L 'Jnstitut d'Egypte, Tome
XXX (1947-1948), 229-250.

12 Tom Little, High Dam at Aswan (New York: John Day Publisher, 1965), 39.
13 See Waterbury and Clement Henry Moore, Images of Development: Egyptian Engineers in Search of
Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980).

14 See the introduction to Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, International Development and the
Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1997); and Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of
the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

15 Cooper provides much needed historical perspective on the colonial origins of the development discourse,
showing that this discourse emerged out of interactions between imperial power structures and local
mobilizations. He also attends to the different trajectories of British and French development initiatives;
the British undertook development initiatives in response to labor unrest in the Caribbean and Africa, while
the French promoted corporatist organization to spur production and income generation. See Frederick
Cooper, "Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept," in Cooper and
Packard, 64-91.
16 My account of the mechanics of flood control in the basin and perennial systems is largely taken from
Hurst, 38-54.
17 Robert Mabro, The Egyptian Economy, 1952-1972 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 84-85.
18 See Mabro on the three aspects of Egypt's water supply problem: spatial distribution, seasonal redistribution,
and long-term redistribution. Ibid., 36.

19 Hurst, 46.
20 Waterbury, 88.
21 In debates about Nile regulation in the twentieth century, "over-year storage" is a term that refers to the
retention of water from one year for use in a subsequent year. This is different than the storage of water
from one season to be used in the next within a given year.
22 Little, 25; Waterbury, 87.
23 Daninos, 233; Mabro, 8; and Waterbury, 87.
24 William Willcocks, The Nile Reservoir Dam and After (London: E & F. N. Spon Ltd., I 905), 2.
25 See Murdoch Macdonald, Nile Control (Cairo: Ministry of Public Works, 1920), and Hurst.
26 Hurst, 295-304.
27 William Garstin, Report Upon the Basin of the Upper Nile (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1904);
Henry G. Lyons, Physiography of the River Nile and Its Basin (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1906);
and William Willcocks and J. I. Craig, Egyptian Irrigation (London: E & F. N. Spon, 1913).
28 See Waterbury, 87-90.
29 See Robert L. Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918-1952 (Princeton,
NJ : Princeton University Press, 1984 ), 91-97 and Robert Tignor, "Nationalism, Economic Planning, and
Development Projects in Interwar Egypt," International Journal of African Historical Studies 10 ( 1977).
30 Macdonald, I.
31 El Shakry, 200-20 I.
32 Wendel Cleland, The Population Problem in Egypt: A Study of Population Trends and Conditions in Modern
Egypt (Lancaster, PA: Science Press Printing Company, 1936). See also Omnia El Shakry, "Barren Land
and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt," International Journal of
Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 3 (August 2005) and El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, chapter five.
Cleland was chiefly concerned not only with the quantity of Egypt's population, but also with its quality
of life. Overpopulation was a problem to be solved through birth control, as well as raising the standard of
living through improvements in economic wellbeing and hygiene.
33 Cleland, 91,108-09.
34 lbid.
35 E. R. J. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820-1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1969), 265.

36 Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change, 9-10. "Large landowners" refers to families
who possessed estates of 200 feddans or more.

37 Little, 28.
38 Daninos, 240.
39 Waterbury, 96.
40 Daninos, 232.
41 Ibid., 236.
42 Ibid., 230.
43 For a summary of hydro-electrification debates in inter-war Egypt see Vitalis, chapter three.
44 Daninos, 232-235.
45 H. E. Hurst relinquished his concerns about surface evaporation rates after the Revolutionary Command
Council came out in support of the High Dam proposal. Other notable critica at this stage included 'Abd al-
Shokr ♦ 29
'Aziz Ahmad, who was one of the few to express his opposition publicly. For an overview of early critiques
of the project, see Waterbury, 120-25.
46 Macdonald, 6.
47 Daninos, 238 (my translation).
48 Ibid., 243-44. Daninos also worked in collaboration with a number of foreign engineers, including Jean
Aubert, a professor at L'Ecole des Ponts et Chausees in Paris. Aubert had been involved in French dam
building projects for multiple purposes, about which he lectured in Cairo. See Jean Aubert, "Les ldees
Modernes en Matiere d' Amenagments Hydauliques," L 'Egypte Contemporaine 240 (May 1947). By 1949,
Daninos had formulated his plan in greater detail and formed the International Nile Valley Syndicate, of
which Aubert was a member. See Little, 53.
49 This account of the High Dam and its relationship to the TVA is concerned with the initial conception
of the dam in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For a detailed account of the interactions between Soviet
and Egyptian experts who worked on the High Dam in the late 1950s and I 960s, see Elizabeth Bishop,
"Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan High Dam," unpublished Ph. D.
dissertation, University of Chicago, 1997. This period in the history of the construction of the High Dam
is not this article's primary concern.
50 Muscle Shoals quoted in Gordon Clapp, The TVA: An Approach to the Development of a Region (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1955), 6. Emphasis in original.

51 Tennessee Valley Authority, "The Historical Roots of TVA," Annual Report of the Tennessee Valley
Authority (I 953 ), 52.

52 National Conservation Commission, Report of the National Conservation Commission (Washington,
DC, 1909), 24.

53 Tennessee Valley Authority, 53.
54 Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), 322.
55 James C. Scott, "High Modernist Social Engineering: The Case of the Tennessee Valley Authority," in
Lloyd I. Rudolph and John Kurt Jacobsen, eds., Experiencing the State (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 3-52.
56 Gilbert F. White, "A Perspective of River Basin Development," Law and Contemporary Problems 22
(Spring 1957), 161.

57 Ibid., 181-82.
58 David Ekbladh, "Mr. TVA: Grassroots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the
Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933-1973," Diplomatic History
26, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 17.
59 Ibid., 24-31.
60 Today, the development community tends to view the TVA's multi-purpose approach more critically, having
observed its devastating social and environmental consequences over the middle decades of the twentieth
century. Born in a high-modernist moment that favored grand development schemes to tame nature for the
welfare of human beings, the TVA model has been in decline since the 1970s. Dominant conceptions of
development since then have placed more confidence in the private sector and local economic initiatives
while tending to scorn the large state-administered projects of the past. For a recent assessment of large
dams and their social and environmental effects, see World Commission on Dams, Dams and Development:
A New Framework/or Decision Making (November 2000). Available at www.damsreport.org.
61 Little, 30-31.
62 John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy a/Two Regimes (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1983), 60. The establishment of the PCDNPwas passed by law, which described
the Council's mandate as follows:
All projects intended to increase national production, agriculture, the Egyptian economy, and
trade exchanges shall be exhaustively studied, together with all related projects for irrigation,
land reclamation, crop rotation, improved sowing and harvesting methods, land survey, cattle
breeding, electricity, road building and other means of transport, oil prospecting, mining, govern-
ment support to existing industries, new industrial installations, a nationwide industrialization
designed to be the main asset of a national economy, internal and external marketing, invest-
ments and international loans, taxation and customs tariffs ...in light of their contribution to the
national economy.
See Rashed El-Barawy, The Military Coup in Egypt: An Analytic Study (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press,
198 I), 245-246.
63 Al-Majlis al-Da'im li-Tanmiyat al-lntaj al-Qawmi, Mashru' al-Sadd al- 'Ali, 4 (my translation).
64 I am not suggesting that water usage for agriculture has declined or that it has increased in other economic
sectors. On the contrary, Egypt's water today is overwhelmingly used for irrigation and agriculture, about
88 percent in comparison to 5 percent for industry and 7 percent for domestic usage. See World Bank, From
Scarcity to Security, 7. Indeed the few standard accounts of the High Dam that do focus on its technological
aspects, such as Tom Little's High Dam at Aswan and John Waterbury's Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley,
make almost no mention of the multi-purpose development or any other external influences on the building
of the High Dam. Despite recognizing Daninos as the originator of the plan, they fail to mention that he
traveled to the United States, that his proposal made repeated reference to river development projects in the
United States, France, India, and China, or that he was enthralled by multi-purpose development as a new
model of resource management and economic transformation. In ignoring these crucial aspects of Daninos'
study, these accounts leave us with very internally focused descriptions ofriver development inside Egypt,
without considering the global movement of ideas and technical practices within which these schemes
were being formulated and debated. Only by looking at these wider transnational linkages can we begin
to understand how projects like the High Dam were not just the invention of centralized state planning in
the Third World, but in fact have a longer genealogy that goes back to American resource development
projects in the 1930s.
65 Scott, "High Modernist Social Engineering," and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998),
introduction.
66 lnternationalBank for Reconstruction and Development, The Economic Development ofEgypt(Department
of Operations Asia and Middle East, August I 955), I, 4, 12, 18; Al-Majlis al-Da'im li-Tanmiyat al-lntaj
al-Qawmi, Mashru' al-Sadd al- 'Ali, 5, 12.
67 Al-Hay'a al-'Ammah Ii-Bina' al-Sadd al-'Ali, al-Sadd al- 'Ali (May 1964), unnumbered pages. This
statement of the High Dam's projected impact on Egypt's national income came in the midst of Egypt's
first five-year plan for industrialization ( 1960-1965), when the government announced its aim to double
Egypt's national income in ten years. See Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, 83-93 and Anouar
Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society: The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser, Charles
Lam Markmann, trans. (New York: Random House, 1968), 13 I.
68 See Ellis Goldberg, Trade, Reputation, and Child Labor in Twentieth-Century Egypt (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), chapter four.

69 Owen, 260-262.
7 °Charles lssawi, Egypt at Mid-Century: An Economic Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954),
83.
71 Mahmoud Anise, "A Study of the National Income of Egypt," L 'Egypte Contemporaine 261-262 (Cairo:
Societe Fouad !er d'Economie Politique, de Statistique et de Legislation, 1950), preface. The Middle East
Financial Conference was convened in 1944 by the Allied powers to deal with rampant wartime inflation.
The conference was held in Cairo from 24 to 29 April and was attended by five ministers of finance and
seventy senior officials from fifteen different countries, including representatives from the U.S. and British
treasuries. See E. M. H. Lloyd, Food and Inflation in the Middle East, 1940-1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1956), 194-207, and Timothy Mitchell's account of Anise's' study in Rule of Experts
101, 112-113.
72 See Timothy Mitchell, "Society, Economy, and the State Effect," in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture:
State Formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 76-97, and Rule a/Experts,
introduction and chapter three.
73 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 99.
'"Anise, 667. While Cleland also looked at productivity statistics, they were secondary to his analysis and
based not on national figures of income and production, but rather on estimates of the crop value produced
per feddan in Egypt. He took these series of calculations from the Atlas of Egypt, 1928. See Cleland, 92.
75 National Bank of Egypt, 'The Benefit-Cost Analysis of the High Dam: A Case Study on the Economics
of Water Projects Evaluation," Economic Bulletin, 18, no. 4 ( 1965). The authors of the report also cited
the work of Harvard economist Otto Eckstein who pioneered the study of river projects using cost-benefit
Shokr ♦ 31
analysis. See Otto Eckstein and John V. Krutilla, Multi-Purpose River Development: Studies in Applied
Economic Analysis (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1958) and Otto Eckstein, Water-Resource Development:
The Economics of Project Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
76 Al-Hay'a al-'Ammah Ii-Bina' al-Sadd al-'Ali, al-Sadd al- 'Ali; Ministry of the High Dam, Aswan High
Dam Authority, Aswan High Dam (January 1968); United Arab Republic, "The High Dam," in Eleven Years
of Progress and Development, I 952-1963 (Cairo: Information Department, 1963).
77 See El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, chapter seven, and Mitchell, Rule of Experts, chapter
seven. Like many governments in the Third World, Nasser's regime sought to establish its legitimacy and
distinctive authority by presenting itself as the deliverer of economic development for the whole nation.
See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993), especially 202-205. But this was not the sole legitimation strategy used
by the Nasser regime. Other arguments about class revolution and standing up to great powers figured just
as much in the new regime's discourse about itself. Omnia El Shakry argues that the mode ofregulation that
underpinned Egypt's etatist economic system relied much more on the concept of social welfare as the telos
of government than the idea of development. See El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, 206.
78 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The Economic Development of Egypt (August
1955), 3.
79 The National Charter of 1962 stated that one of its goals was "to strike a humane balance between the
requirements of production and those ofconsumption." Cited in Essam Montasser, "Egypt's Pattern ofTrade
and Development: A Model of Import Substitution Growth," L'Egypte Contemporaine 65 (1974). ♦

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standard political economy accounts, such an approach treats "development" as a dis-

to be solved by improved irrigation in order to support a growing population, were

5 H. E. Hurst, The Nile (London: Constable Publishers, 1957), 281.

University of California Press, 1995).

XXX (1947-1948), 229-250.

Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980).

the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

and long-term redistribution. Ibid., 36.

23 Daninos, 233; Mabro, 8; and Waterbury, 87.

Oxford University Press, 1969), 265.

who possessed estates of 200 feddans or more.

47 Daninos, 238 (my translation).

University of Chicago Press, 1955), 6. Emphasis in original.

Authority (I 953 ), 52.

DC, 1909), 24.

(Spring 1957), 161.

Macmillan, 2004), chapter four.

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