Aswan and Wittfogel: A Technological and History of Technology Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954

Britannica. Which lifted it from Shutterstock, how the mighty have fallen, etc. 

The Aswan high dam is one of the biggest dams in the world, which is understandable, since it controls one of the world's most important rivers, although one with perhaps a bit less volume at the outlet than I expected. 

So, yeah, thought I'd start with negging the Nile. I'll let you all know if it decides to date me. The numbers, per Wikipedia, if you're a dam fan, which no-one is except when they're visiting them because civil engineering is boring unless you're there to see it is that it is 111m high and 3,830m long, and because it is an earth embankment dam, it is a kilometer wide at its base. It has an installed generating capacity of 2100 MW, which isn't actually that much by a jaded BCer's perspective. The Revelstoke Dam generates more current, and even the Keenleyside flood control dam at Castlegar that plays an important role in the tech blogging "story" such as it is by flooding beachfront Nakusp on its 1968 completion, still has a 185MW capacity.  This is because its main purpose is to regulate the flooding of the Nile, for which reason it impounds a 5250 square kilometer, entirely within the boundaries of Egypt, and it is the most historically consequential dam on the world's most historically consequential river.

The introduction to the Wikipedia article notes that it exists in large part for political reasons. The British had a plan to manage the Nile with sacrificial zones in Sudan and Ethiopia, to which Nasser and his colleagues said, "Thanks, but no thanks," which, given the historical reluctance of upstream authorities to sacrifice sacrifice zones when sacrificing is called for, seems like it was a wise choice notwithstanding the high evaporation rate off the Aswan reservoir.

In terms of its political history, there is a lot of meat on the High Aswan Dam bone. Were I to write about that, there are many satisfactory blog-sized conclusions that could be drawn, such as that John Foster Dulles was preposterously unqualified for his role; that the China Lobby is enough to have you rethinking the Great Terror (We could use a man like Robespierre today!); that, er, something about the post-Six Days War territorial settlement in the Middle East (Erik looks around, cringing pathetically); that imperialism is bad.

I do want to talk about politics, but not those politics, even if I come around to the margins of my cringe, because civil engineering is boring, and so people just can't help talking around it, and if it isn't geology and geography, it is . . .well, it's something that hopefully some scholar of science fiction has put a name to and received tenure for, because it's goldarned important, the usurpation of reality by a story that scratches the science fiction itch, and that's as felicitously as I can think to put this insight.

Since I am here to discuss Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic despotism" thesis, it is important to understand the literature to which I refer.

Specifically, I don't give a shit about what Wittfogel had to say in his tediously long book. I learned just now (thanks Google!) that someone before me mentioned reclaiming the Zuider Zee and the Fens and dyking Sacramento and that Wittfogel had gamely doubled down by inventing  "hydroagricultural" societies, for which he attempted to a geographical gloss that makes it even more clear that "It's not despotism when White people do it.")

What do I give a shit about? Two novels that I read as a teenager, of which I am going to ignore Niven's World Out of Time because yuck, in favour of Poul Anderson's Long Way Home, a very early novel by one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction that didn't get a lot of traction before rereleases in the Seventies. It turns out from the Goodreads summary that I don't actually remember the plot, but the future dystopia is explained as "An Oriental hydraulic despotism, only without hydraulics because it turns out that Communist centrally planned economies are effectively hydraulic despotism, just like Wittfogel says, and this is that."  

This, in fact, drops us in the middle of a conversation that goes back to Montesquieu, with a heavy dose of Marx along the way, and a completely logically-indefensible invasion by the pseudo-history of Mars along the way. (The solar system is gradually cooling down and drying out; the Martians built their canals to irrigate their landscape as it dried; Egyptians and Mesopotamians did the same; Mars is presumable some kind of scientific despotism to keep its global canal system working, as Egypt and Mesopotamia and China more obviously are or were. The world is still drying out, as see Arizona tree ring studies and the collapse of the Anansi civilisation in the 13th Century, which is when all these other bad things happened, too. Various conclusions, such as that anthropogenic climate change is a myth, are then to be drawn.) I'm not going to footnote this, or link it, because that would be like cracking eggs with a sledgehammer. People's understanding of the world is often based on the half-remembered plots of science fiction novels they read in their teens. Accuracy is just precisely not the issue here. Thank God, Erik says in retrospect, for Joe Haldeman and the uncharacteristic early Gordon Dickson offering, Naked to the Stars. 

In 1956, the issues with the Aswan dam were twofold. The State Department and Foreign Office persuaded themselves that, if it could be built, it would not make money. More technical views were rounded up to prove that it was a bad idea because the water would evaporate too much and erosion and environmental damage would be excessive. None of these, of course, proved out to anything like the extent described. The Hydropower Institute of Moscow, which designed the dam, overcame significant hurdles in sealing the base of the dam, not surprisingly considering just how many dams it designed, and how many construction projects it managed. To illustrate this paragraph, I have chosen a dam on the Yenisei, because Siberia is romantic, but the projects upon which we might be inclined to focus given the theme of this post are in Khrushchev's "Virgin Lands." As far as I understand the machine translated recent work on the Virgin Lands in Russia, the long run consequences are not as bad as they were made out to be? But people do like to get upset about irrigation megaprojects, and still do, with respect to the American West.

Besides "hydraulic despotism," the thing we are probably going to remember Karl Wittfogel for today is his turn from his early Communism to his militant anti-communism, which led him to testify against Owen Lattimore before the McCarran Committee, an all-too-easily forgotten Senate committee that worked alongside McCarthy's Senate Investigation Committee and the HUAC to make political hay out of bullying American communists and communist-adjacent individuals. This was, of course, in context of Lattimore's opinions about the Nationalist regime, not the deep past. Lattimore is currently, as of October 1955, making mincemeat out of his critics rather than developing the Steppe and the Sown, which makes much of the moving isocline of dry agriculture on the Eurasian steppe and the way that it impacts relations between "nomadic" power and settled. Another victim of Wittfogel's informing was Moses Finley, a leftist who never recanted his views, but rather left America for Cambridge and a close association with Karl Polanyi. I've noted the laudatory Newsweek review of The World of Odysseus, and the certainly-not accidental decision to give the author byline as "M. Finley." World was an early attempt in the Finley/Polanyi school of decapitalising ancient history (crudely, what looks like trade is socially embedded reciprocal gift exchange) and is an early effort in breaking down the distinction between "Oriental" and "Western" society in the Iron and Classical Age, just as Wittfogel was theorising those distinctions into the historical and political centrality they retain today.     

 

  See how we can't resist theorising around dams, because dams are so boring? At the head of this post I disparaged the Aswan Dam for producing less power than the Revelstoke Dam, which was just one of the hydraulic megaprojects that we associate with the long premiership of W. A. C. Bennett, almost the symbol of my province's old and very provincial days. A Kelowna man, for God's sake! But Aswan transformed Egypt because there was just so little electrical generation going on there before its turbines were hooked up. Aswan made a poor country much richer, whereas we've ended up selling a large amount of B.C.'s hydropower to the United States, and look where that's got us. And again I've shifted from talking about the giant pile of dirt to the results.

I'd like there to be a technological history of Twentieth Century "hydroagricultural" megaprojects. I just have no idea how to write one.