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Paper short abstract:

Since ca. 1900, Australia pursued a radical hydro-modernist project to transform its environment and populate the continent with white settlers. Irrigation was a key means for building a new society unconstrained by natural limits. The crisis of salinization put an end to these utopian ambitions.

Paper long abstract:

The notion that Australia was an “empty” and “useless” continent was crucial for its colonization by a predominantly white settler society. In the land that was considered “terra nullius”, the high modernist project of technologically transforming nature for human needs developed into a radical blend of modernism and settler nationalism. In the twentieth century, irrigation and hydrologic infrastructures were understood as key means to appropriate the continent and transform it beyond its natural constraints. Water was the centerpiece of Australian High Modernism. With little to no regard for traditional land use patterns, powerful state agencies set about creating entirely new landscapes and white settler communities based on irrigated agriculture. In this vision of an “Australia Unlimited”, a new society was to be forged which would free itself from the tyranny of the wide, arid, unproductive continent. Building hydrologic infrastructures meant building a nation.

Drawing on my case study about the southern Murray-Darling Basin between 1945 and 2020, I argue that this endeavor was in crisis by the 1970s: The excessive mobilization of water caused widespread soil and water degradation – chiefly salinization – in Australia’s most important agricultural areas which threatened to undermine them. During the 1970s and 80s, salinization became a top-priority environmental issue in Australia. As a result, the combined forces of neoliberalism and sustainability induced a transformation of Australia’s public irrigation sector. Water was turned from a seemingly unlimited resource into a high-value commodity. Hydro modernism ceased to be a utopian force; farming became a business.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the political ecology of Italian fascism that drove dam building in the Alps can be understood as an expression of high modernity. It further reflects on how the regime's hydroelectric schemes socio-ecologically transformed the affected watersheds and valley communities.

Paper long abstract:

During the interwar period, Italy's fascist regime focused on modernising the country by expanding its hydropower infrastructure. Especially in the water-rich southern Alps, energy corporations with close ties to Rome built hydropower plants to supply industrial metropolises with energy. The regime's propaganda created a narrative that favoured the exploitation of the "white coal" in the Alps in newspapers, newsreels, and other media, announcing Italy's supposedly unstoppable progress to becoming an imperial power. The propaganda glorified engineers and construction workers as heroic protagonists of development, while their high-altitude construction sites appeared as epic battlefields against the forces of nature. Although historians have examined the regime's media culture as an expression of fascist modernity (Ben-Ghiat 2009), they have hardly explored the regime's hydroelectric expansion. Nonetheless, recent studies have pointed to the political ecology of fascism as seen through its environmental policies and infrastructure projects (Armiero / Biasillo / Hardenberg 2022). In this paper, I first aim to bridge studies on fascist high modernism with those on the political ecology of the Mussolini regime. Secondly, using newspaper articles and sources from municipal archives, I outline the local impact of dam construction. As a case study, I focus on the hydro-technical industrialization of the Formazza Valley in northern Piedmont between 1926 and 1940. I aim to show how the development of hydro-energy under the political ecology of fascism can be understood as a radical expression of European high modernism (or hydro modernism) and discuss how the affected communities reacted to this extractive invasion.

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Paper short abstract:

Varying international players looked to desalination as a potential tool for development in the 1950s and 1960s, playing up its appeal to repurpose the oceans and help maximize the efficient use of the world’s water resources. Yet, as with so many high modernist stories, the panacea became the pain.

Paper long abstract:

Through a process encompassing global actors and international organizations, varying major players looked to desalination as a potential tool for development in the 1950s and 1960s. Similar to other large water infrastructure schemes in the post-WWII period, it became a novel iteration of well-established ideas about the power of technology to control nature and the “portability” of water expertise within the complex interplay of postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and the surge of Cold War tensions. While high costs still prohibited the use and application of desalination on a wide scale, proponents held hopes that new technological advances would soon bring about a massive breakthrough: tapping into the oceans to offer a new, easily accessible, and potentially endless source of fresh water for those places around the world that needed it the most. As with so many high modernist stories though, the panacea became the pain. In many ways, desalination largely proved a “failed” technology in that it did not offer a localized solution to a global problem and ended up requiring the same major investments in capital and energy as large dams, and portending similar environmental impacts. Yet, as a from of hope and aspiration, the pursuit of desalination illustrates the large number of possible paths of development found possible and desirable in the post-WWII period. Indeed, the high-modernist ethos took hold in different and multifarious forms, showing that the wider postwar push to meet water-related challenges from the supply side was complicated and contested to say the least.

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Paper short abstract:

In 1970, Québec announced the “Project of the Century”, the biggest hydro development in the western world. A strong example of high modernism? New public bodies took control of the project, inspired by ultra-liberal models implemented in the first part of the 20th century by the private sector.

Paper long abstract:

When Robert Bourassa, Premier of Quebec, announced the “Project of the Century” in 1970, it was the biggest hydroelectric development in the Western World. Analysis of the model implemented in James Bay leads to the conclusion that Quebec was in fact inspired by previous models of gigantic private hydroelectric developments in other regions, namely Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (SLSJ) and the province of Newfoundland. Three principles were implemented: the government was directly involved in strategic decision making; the integration of municipal powers to support the enormous project; the control over all natural resources (and not only hydraulic forces), all with free rein, away from any compromising standards in terms of land use and environmental protection. High modernism at its best?

Techniques previously used by Alcan, a multinational corporation, with total control over “company towns” were reproduced by a public organization taking control of a vast land. A municipality with unique characteristics was established on a municipal territory that became the largest in Quebec. For thirty years, the board of directors of the Société de développement de la baie James (SDBJ), whose members were appointed by the government, replaced the municipal council in order to preside over the management of a territory covering nearly a quarter of the total area of the province. The vast territory was completely extruded from the existing municipalities to ensure no interference from democratic voice. This political structure made possible the smooth advancement of harnessing unparalleled hydraulic resources, despite strong protests from the Cree first Nation.

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Paper short abstract:

From travelling engineers to socialist megalomania, hydrotechnical projects were fashioned after high-modernist ideas. For decades, warning voices on soil erosion from within and abroad were ignored. This unveils a problematic path dependency in infrastructure design difficult to abandon once taken.

Paper long abstract:

From travelling engineers towards the end of the 19th century through Western involvement in forced industrialization to international criticism of large-scale constructions, Russian and Soviet hydrotechnical projects were present on the global agora of knowledge. Especially since the late 1950s, one can observe a vivid transnational exchange of expertise during an era of high-modernist promises, but also a rise of globally similar issues like soil erosion and habitat destruction. This unveils a problematic path dependency difficult to abandon once taken. For decades, warning voices were ignored.

As early as the mid-1930s, Soviet soil scientists like Viktor Kovda, who became a driving force behind the “Soil Map of the World” and a highly active protagonist on the international stage, pointed at the dangers of soil degradation through salinization. However, adapted methods that took local conditions into account seemed incompatible with the abstract centrally controlled system of a socialist command economy. As a result, harvests collapsed even on the world’s most fertile soils, the black earth (chernozem). In the late 1980s, an area the size of Croatia suffered anthropogenic soil salinization across the Soviet Union.

While soil erosion as an environmental issue had created awareness at least since the turn of the century, the political context in which it could be framed changed significantly with time. This paper’s perspective therefore questions the implications of a supposed ‘Age of Ecology’ (Joachim Radkau) since the 1970s, promising new insights into transnational technopolitics and local agency alike in proposing solutions to a pressing ecological problem.

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Paper short abstract:

Comparing a few imperial settings across time and space suggests that high modernism needs to be enacted at the local level, and is less temporally restricted than the concept suggests. Power is not an outside force waiting to be manifested, power is enacted continuously through infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I propose a comparative discussion on selected imperial settings across time and space to be able to suggest that 1) high modernism needs to be enacted at the local level, and 2) high modernism may be less temporally restricted than the concept suggests. Indeed, colonial power in the 19th and 20th century was firmly based on irrigated production. At the same time, some 5000 years ago the Neo-Assyrian Empire empowered itself through large canal systems. Water control did not always create central states either. Dutch water developments supported both central and local involvement. Hohokam communities (0-1450 AD, USA) centralized water control, but not the state. Still, the typical image of imperial efforts – high modern or not – is of a centrally planned effort by state officials. My own work suggests that although loads of planning efforts were involved by many people and institutions, we should remember (Captain) Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean” when trying to understand imperial development: “Do you think he plans it all out, or does he make it up as he goes along?”. Far from ignoring power relations, I just refuse to make power the typical outside force waiting to be manifested. Power is being enacted continuously in societies through infrastructures. As such, Scott’s position on state power needs more than ‘Seeing like a state’ (Scott, 1999) – as the positions developed in ‘Weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) and ‘The art of not being governed’ (Scott, 2009) are crucial additions.

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In this paper, I propose a historical account of hydraulic infrastructures as a flood control strategy since the colonial era in South Asian context and propose a critique of modern solutions while underpinning the epistemic violence conducted upon local communities.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst the recent floods observed globally, I propose to historicise the flood control mechanisms since the colonial period, later extended into the state policies and global international organisations. These flood control mechanisms specifically focus on the hydraulic infrastructures and their ‘qualitative development’ with the scientific advancement that validated the hegemony of coloniser, the institution of state, and international organisations over the native/local/indigenous people as well as on the nature/rivers. I draw the link of this hegemony and coloniality over local people and water with the epistemic power relations that result in the marginalised knowledge systems. These marginalised knowledge systems imply a harmonic relationship between humans and nature rather than treating the latter merely as a resource to be extracted. In this context of hegemony over nature through floods and epistemicide of indigenous knowledge systems, I present a critical aspect to the modern solutions/techno-managerial hydraulic infrastructures towards controlling floods while building on historical accounts from South Asian riverine ecologies.

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Paper short abstract:

Indian hydro-engineers enjoyed a great deal of mobility within and outside the British Empire. Drawing upon their engineering education, experience, and expertise in driving hydraulic modernity, I will show how knowledge sharing about large dam projects was a means of legitimacy for hydro-modernism.

Paper long abstract:

Indian hydro-engineers enjoyed a great deal of mobility within and outside the British Empire. After independence, Indian hydro-engineers developed and disseminated their hydro-modernism in India and the Global South, surveying, and consulting with countries about their large infrastructural projects, especially dams. Indian engineers occupied an interstitial space—experts who were not colonizers—one that they used to their advantage. Yet, there remained questions from inside and outside the water bureaucracy about how and why these dams were justified, given the lack of reliable data. Using persistent questioning of these modern water management schemes from activists and insiders alike which began in the 1950s, I will show how India’s hydraulic bureaucracy survived and evolved. Drawing upon their engineering education at the cusp of independence, experience, and expertise in driving hydraulic modernity within the British Empire, post-independence India and the Global South, I will show how knowledge sharing about large dam projects was a means of legitimacy for hydro-modernism. This was especially true through and after the 1970s when the ecological and social effects of hydro-modernism were writ large, spawning activism such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Knowledge sharing about large infrastructural schemes, especially in trade publications like the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, propagated and legitimized the hydraulic bureaucracy. In bringing out these perspectives, I argue that the currency of hydro-modernism was knowledge sharing.