Keyboard shortcuts

/ or ⌘/Ctrl K
Find a note
j / k
Next / previous section or linked note
h / l
Collapse or go to parent / expand or enter
e or Alt-click
Read a linked note here
o
Open focused note on its own
g g / G
First / last section or linked note
g h / g a
Home / all notes
g b / g t
Backlinks / table of contents
t
Cycle System, Light, Dark
? / Esc
Show / close this reference

Search: ↑/↓ or Ctrl N/P, Enter to open. Shortcuts pause while typing.

Cook - The Aswan Low Dam and Modernizing the Nile [c14b837b]

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