For technocrats and political administrators, the dam served as a tool with which to rearticulate the colony as a physical territory, mapped according to irrigation patterns, cotton cultivation, and capital flow. In this sense, the dam represented a means of colonizing the Egyptian environment, partially through its organization of a cash-crop producing economy. The production of colonial geography was also colored by a series of unantici-pated interactions among pieces of infrastructure, environmental forces, cultivation patterns, and Egyptian peasants. The irrigation frontier that divided more northern cotton-producing regions from Egypt’s deep south demarcated regional differences in the character of the land itself, includ-ing its relationship with peasant cultivators. A shift in the temporality of
irrigation—cultivators now watered the land more frequently throughout the year—literally soaked the Nile Delta with irrigation water. The land did not respond with the anticipated increased productivity as technocrats failed to account for the importance of drainage and the impact of the changed relationship between water and soil. The spread of perennial irrigation in the Delta meant that canals that once functioned as drains for lands under perennial irrigation before the dam’s construction were now filled with water and no longer facilitated drainage.35 The absence of drainage mecha-nisms resulted in a rising subsoil water table in the north of Egypt. The continuous presence of water on perennially irrigated lands interfered with processes that had promoted soil fertility. In the dry season associated with the seasons of flood agriculture known as sharaqi, fallow lands had heated, dried, and cracked. These processes aerated the soil, broke up colloids, and promoted the growth of nitrifying bacteria.36 However, colonial technocrats believed that sharaqi lands reflected wasted agricultural productivity and thus discouraged the practice through new irrigation regimes.37 Finally, as it was no longer rinsed by periodic flooding over the higher banks of the Nile, the salinity of the soil increased. Problems with drainage, soil fertility, and salinity not only stunted agricultural production;38 as these problems especially plagued the Nile Delta, they signaled the extension of a regionally differentiated colonial geography to the character of the land itself.
The reconfiguration of agriculture stemming from new irrigation pat-terns also involved the severing of relationships between cultivators and local agricultural environments. The construction of the first Aswan dam initiated a pattern of land expropriation from predominantly Nubian vil-lages that culminated with the High Dam and the destruction of historical Nubia in 1964. In 1902, the Egyptian government issued a decree declaring particular villages part of the public domain. The primary victim of this initial expropriation was the village of Shallal—reconstituted under the same name at a nearby site in the 1930s—and portions of other neighboring villages.39 A special commission composed of a representative from the Min-istry of Finance, two representatives from the district, and an additional ap-pointed member assessed individual holdings and compensation payments.
Entirely expropriated by the state, the inhabitants of Shallal were compen-sated for the value of their land, in addition to buildings, date palms, and henna plants. The inhabitants of villages only partially incorporated into the public domain were offered compensation for land and property both inside and outside of the new state domain.40 The process of expropriation and isolation that began with the 1902 dam continued with future projects to heighten the dam. Some villages were totally submerged by the Nile’s
new geography near Aswan, but many others faced decreasing agricultural opportunities as portions of their farmland were partially submerged, only accessible for both sowing and harvesting for brief periods of the year.41
The archival trail mapping displacement emphasizes its significance as a process of geographic reconfiguration rather than community rupture.
In colonial thought, Egyptian peasants were conceptually figured as either agricultural producers or as vessels of ancient tradition. They possessed specificity of neither time nor place. For technocrats like Willcocks, the imagining of a historically stunted rural Egypt facilitated the conceptual transformation of Egyptian peasants into the simplest of agricultural pro-ducers. The absence of debate concerning the 1902 displacement of Shal-lal stood in marked contrast to the controversy surrounding the Philae Temple. Whereas international outrage erupted at the prospect of destroy-ing an ancient monument, Egyptian peasants existed as mobile pieces of an agricultural landscape. Although the landscape itself was locally differ-entiated, the imagined simplicity of Egyptian peasants prevented colonial technocrats from grasping the significance of the human components of that landscape.42 Following the construction of the dam, financial com-pensation was meant to erase the pain of displacement in communities like Shallal, but colonial officials did not recognize the importance of localized agricultural relationships associated with specific plots of land.
Changes in irrigation practice also sparked new struggles with disease.
In an April 11, 1927, address to l’Institut d’Egypte, Willcocks attributed ris-ing subsoil water levels to increases in the prevalence of particular diseases, specifically bilharzia and “anklyostoma,” among peasants in northern Egypt farming land under perennial irrigation.43 Bilharzia, also known as schisto-somiasis, is a parasitic infection that results from the exposure of skin to in-fected freshwater containing aquatic snails. “Ankloyostoma” (ancylostoma), or hookworm infection, is transmitted by direct contact with contaminated soil. Willcocks argued that the incidence of both of these conditions among peasants working the land had increased dramatically since the construction of the 1902 dam and the spread of perennial irrigation. He claimed that 95 percent of the peasants working perennially irrigated land in the Delta were infected with ancylostoma and 65 percent with bilharzia.44 Although the ac-curacy of Willcocks’s statistics is questionable, that the dam and the spread of perennial irrigation resulted in the increased prevalence of waterborne infections among rural populations is not.
Despite the fact that perennial irrigation was uncommon in southern Egypt, peasants in this region faced the threat of malaria. The damming of the Nile produced changes in the physical composition of the river and its
annual cycles. The river’s ecosystem consequently evolved. Curly pondweed (Potamogeton crispus) thrived in this new environment and large traveling islands of weeds formed on the river. The Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes that transmitted malaria laid eggs on these mobile islands, thus moving the disease along the river.45 Because of shifts in the physical environment of the dammed river, malaria moved easily into southern Egypt where it found a vulnerable human population. In 1942, there was a large malaria outbreak in southern Egypt centered in regions devoted to sugarcane cul-tivation. Timothy Mitchell argues that a changing natural environment, market changes produced by World War II, specifically the shortage of artificial fertilizers, malnutrition among Upper Egyptian peasants, and the consumption of sugarcane lay at the root of this epidemic.46
These environmental changes and their effects on rural communities highlight the failure of irrigation engineers to fully appreciate the impact that the dam would have on the ecosystems of the Nile and the lands that bordered it. This stemmed, in part, from their conceptualization of the dam and the ecosystem in which it was constructed. The engineers who built the dam envisioned it as a piece of technology designed to control and aug-ment a natural, that is, nonhuman, environaug-ment. Therefore, the dam was represented by sets of technical diagrams composed of pressures, angles, strains, and materials. This abstraction resulted from an active process of conceptually emptying Egypt’s geography of complicating and dynamic variables. As the relationships between different human communities and the Nile could not be expressed and stabilized in quantifiable terms, they were excluded from the conceptualization of the project. However, above and beyond this conceptual absence, the engineers who built the dam did not grasp the complexity of the river’s ecosystems and the transformative potential of slight changes to the environment. The “natural” ecosystem associated with the river included many factors outside of the river itself.
In this case, the dam’s construction did not cause a minor environmental change, but rather dramatically altered the river and its riparian envi-ronment. Intended as a demonstration of humankind’s ability to harness science to manipulate the environment to its own advantage, this project ultimately demonstrated this ecosystem’s infinite complexity and its inter-connectedness with a more broadly defined environment.