Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (review)

Jessica Teisch’s Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise is not quite as expansive as its title might indicate. It is, rather, a narrower history of the roles that a handful of California water engineers played in developing not only that state’s early irrigation infrastructure, but also similar projects in far-flung parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period that Frederick Newell, the first head of the Bureau of Reclamation, called the “Age of the Engineer” (p. 8).

Engineering Nature has several virtues to commend it. First and most important, it insists that American environmental expertise developed in a transnational context. Anyone who has traced the careers of the nation’s Progressive-era environmental experts and managers cannot help but notice how much traveling and transnational comparative work they did, but scholars have only begun to develop this story, in part because the historiography of American conservation has been so relentlessly national in focus. Teisch’s study is an important corrective. A second virtue is the quality of its case studies, all of which are interesting and well told, and all of which reveal the difficulties of taking environmental expertise forged in one political culture and trying to make it work in another. The book as a whole does not cohere as it might, however, largely because the overarching argument, and the key concepts that inform it, remain underdeveloped.

Teisch begins Engineering Nature by revisiting the history of the development of California water law and the state’s early water infrastructure. It is a tale other scholars have told in great detail, though Teisch does show how much the example of British India mattered to California engineers, even if the state’s nascent political culture would not countenance the statist aspects of irrigation development in colonial India. Teisch then turns her attention to a series of profiles of specific California water and mining engineers—cousins William Hammond Hall and John Hays Hammond, brothers Ben and George Chaffey, and Elwood Mead most prominent among them—and to their efforts to spread the ideas developed in California to frontier societies in Australia, South Africa, Hawaii, and Palestine. In each of these cases, American consulting engineers attempted to transfer a wide variety of ideas and technologies developed in California to new soil, with decidedly mixed results. Throughout her analysis, Teisch shows how the growth of a global economy during this period allowed engineers to travel as avatars of enlightened progress, even as their works often served to further uneven development. As a study that attends to these experts and their travels, Engineering Nature provides an enlightening transnational group portrait.

But the book ultimately suffers from a lack of precision in its key terms and concepts, and historians of technology may well find it a frustrating read as a result. To give the most important example, Teisch refers to her main characters as “California engineers,” but she does little to define either of these two terms. Was there something particular to California that made the state’s engineers so prone to travel and transnational work? What qualified one to be a “California” engineer, and how did this group differ from the engineers to be found in other states? Why, in other words, the focus on California? Teisch does point out that California developed a particular political culture around water, and that the global environments in which these engineers worked had some similarities to California’s, but the significance of California’s engineers as a discrete community is not clearly articulated. Other scholars, such as Michael Smith and Ian Tyrrell, have more successfully argued that California was unique in its community of experts and transnational connections.

Similarly, engineering is not much developed as a central concept. We get very little about the particular training these engineers received, and...