Cook - The Aswan Low Dam and Modernizing the Nile

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