Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

Chapter 5: Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt: The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography

Chapter 5 Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography Jennifer L. Derr In December 1902, with much pomp and circumstance, Egypt’s British and Egyptian elite celebrated the completion of the first Aswan dam. The 1902 Aswan dam (Khazan Aswan) represented a dramatic new foray in the colonial government’s ability to manipulate the physical environment and allocate its most valuable resource. Egypt’s economic livelihood had always depended on the annual Nile flood, and successive governments spearheaded irrigation works to best capitalize on this resource. Following their 1882 occupation of Egypt, the British were no exception. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, newly powerful forms of irrigation infrastructure facilitated the engineering of colonial geography through the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of the Nile. I argue that the significance of the 1902 dam lay in the manner in which it configured Egypt as a colony, specifically its environment, pursuing the following questions: First, how did colonial technocrats imagine and map the colonial Egyptian environment? Second, how did this particular imagination render possible the construction of the dam and its associated irrigation Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt: The 1902 Aswan Dam |  infrastructure? Finally, how did irrigation infrastructure rearticulate the colonial geography of Egypt, facilitating the emergence of a regionally differentiated agricultural landscape? The construction of the dam and the entrenchment of new irrigation regimes reflected a particular vision of the rural Egyptian environment as well as the potential of newly powerful infrastructural forms to transform colonial territory. British Rule and the Construction of the Dam The standard narrative of the 1902 Aswan dam explains its construction as the product of British industrial demand for Egyptian cotton.1 Widespread cultivation of export-oriented cotton in Egypt began in the first portion of the nineteenth century during the rule of Mehmed Ali, Egypt’s strong Ottoman governor. At the time of the British invasion, cotton represented Egypt’s primary economic resource and the means by which this colony could be made productive within a colonial framework. The British colonial administration in Egypt was eager to construct a dam on the Nile to Figure 5.1. The completed 1902 Aswan Dam, viewed from downstream. D. S. George and William E. Garstin, The Nile Reservoir Works at Aswan and Asyut, Cairo: 1902. Reproduced with the permission of The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.  | Jennifer L. Derr increase Egyptian cotton production and supplies to British mills. Discussions concerning possible locations for the dam and the technical aspects of the grandiose project began in the early years of the occupation. Evelyn Baring, the first Earl of Cromer and the British consul-general, requested£E500,000 from Egypt’s reserve fund to pursue the project, only to find his request blocked by the French and Russian members of La Caisse de la Dette Publique (the Public Debt Commission).2 In 1895, Cromer raised the issue to the powers in London, with the idea that the profits from a dam could help finance a British invasion of Sudan.After a period of indecision, the British opted to pursue a military campaign in Sudan instead of constructing the reservoir. However, Cromer and his business allies remained enthusiastic about the dam project, and the consul-general concocted a plan by which an English engineering firm, Sir John Aird and Co., would build a dam over a period of five years, and the “Egyptian” government would repay the cost of construction over a thirty-year period.3 Ernest Cassel, a German British businessman active in many facets of the Egyptian economy during the first three decades of British colonialism, came forward with the money to build the dam and a barrage at Asyut to control the release of stored water. The Asyut barrage was complemented by a series of similar barrages designed to increase the availability of water in specific regions of Egypt.4 Following the completion of the initial dam, a debate began almost immediately concerning the demand for water.5 As a result, the dam was raised twice: first between 1907 and 1912, and again between 1929 and 1933. In the early twentieth century, Egypt possessed approximately six and half million irrigable acres. Following the construction of the Aswan dam, around four million of those acres were perennially irrigated. In Modern Egypt, Lord Cromer boasts of the achievements...