Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation by Christopher Sneddon (review)

Christopher Sneddon has written a valuable contribution to the growing corpus on dams and development, one that fills a research gap with regard to the role of the Bureau of Reclamation. This engineering body has arguably been very influential building dams around the globe, but always seems to stand in the shadow of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The title is striking. What does Sneddon imply with Concrete Revolution? First of all, this points to the fact that dams are among the candidates for what Sneddon calls "century-defining trends" (p. 1). No country—developed or underdeveloped—shied away from building large dams. Sneddon argues that dams upset the relationship between humans and river systems around the world, creating "nature-society hybrids" (p. 1). Second, with its vast arsenal of technological and engineering expertise, the United States played a magor role in this after the Second World War. Sneddon explores how engineering aims of the Bureau became intertwined with American foreign policy objectives, and hence "[t]echnical acumen and geopolitical imagination came together in a methodical process of damming the planet"—another reason to use the "revolution" label.

To study the involvement of the Bureau at this intersection of nature-society and geopolitics, the book zooms in on three river basins—the favored unit of dam-builders—namely the Litani River in the Middle East, the Mekong in Southeast Asia, and the Blue Nile in Africa. In all cases, the expertise of Bureau engineers was accompanied by American foreign policy aims. In that sense, Sneddon has written an institutional history of the Bureau, situated in the context of U.S. geopolitics. At the same time, a conscious attempt is made to examine the local dynamics of the cases, by focusing on actors, networks, and scales. By way of example, the Blue Nile case nicely exemplifies the rift between ambitious strategic plans, and the much more messy situation on the ground (pp. 87–95).

With this book, Sneddon seeks to contribute to two distinct fields. First, it ties in with David Ekbladh's work on the role of the TVA as the paradigmatic model of American modernization efforts, which builds upon an extensive literature of U.S. postwar development efforts overseas (see The Great American Mission, 2009). Concrete Revolution also touches upon the theme of the international exchange of American expertise, fitting the strand of the work done by Jessica Teisch on American (hydro)engineering (see Engineering Nature, 2011). Here I would argue that Sneddon's book is most convincing. He leaves very little doubt about the concrete achievements (pun intended) of the Bureau, and its connections to international engineering endeavors and development networks. The appendix on the Bureau's work abroad buttresses this.

A second goal is to interpret the work of the Bureau in the context of the global cold war. Here, Sneddon's insistence on the Bureau's geopolitical role in cold war American hegemony seems too strong. This is particularly true in chapter 6, where Sneddon discusses the post–cold war era, without going too much into detail on the persistence of alleged American hegemony, and the post–cold war role of the Bureau. The persistence of the dam-building paradigm more generally seems to suggest that the cold war might have been less important than often suggested, and even more "opaque" than Sneddon suggests himself (p. 135).

When Sneddon examines current development discourse, there seems to be more continuity than change. The major changes are that American actors and agents became less dominant, and that, because of tremendous international pressure, the term "dam" is conspicuously absent. Yet Sneddon convincingly argues that the devil is in the details. While new figures have taken prominence, such as Chinese actors, the term "dam" is now repackaged as "hydropower," and increasingly seen as a solution not only for underdevelopment but also for climate change (p. 134). Thus, Sneddon concludes...