A particular(ly) colonial imagination of the Egyptian environment framed the construction of the 1902 dam. This conceptualization not only under-stood the composition of the “natural” environment to contain and exclude certain components; it interpreted the Egyptian environment as funda-mentally malleable and ripe for manipulation. Although the objective mo-tivating the construction of the dam was increased cotton production, this manipulation also resulted in the production of a new, regionally differenti-ated map of water. Because cotton was centered in Egypt’s northern half, perennial irrigation as associated with the state did not spread into south-ern Egypt until the 1930s. Although the dam was at Aswan, near Egypt’s southernmost border, the land that benefited from the newly available water lay in northern and central Egypt. Of the areas that remained under basin irrigation (not irrigated by the dam), Lord Cromer estimated in 1904 that 750,000 of the two million acres lay in Egypt’s south, between Asyut in central Egypt and Qina to its south.20 During this same period, none of the lands lying between Qina and Egypt’s southernmost city of Aswan were perennially irrigated by the state. The situation of the south with respect to irrigation water remained much the same in 1915 after the first heighten-ing of the dam. Sir Murdoch MacDonald, a prominent colonial engineer, reported that while water was available during the summer months to the agricultural regions lying between Cairo and Asyut, the 560,000 feddans lying between Asyut and Baliana (south of Asyut), did not have access to summer water.21 In short, the initial construction of the dam and its first heightening only provided perennial irrigation to those regions that lay to the north of Asyut. The project to irrigate the remaining areas of southern Egypt via state infrastructure did not become a priority until the dam was raised for a second time (1929–33) and a barrage constructed at Naj) Ham-madi (1927–30), which facilitated the watering of the region between Asyut and Baliana without the use of privately funded mechanized irrigation.22
The 1902 Aswan dam transformed water from a local resource into one that could be controlled and allocated at the level of the central state. The agricultural economy structured by the dam was intimately tied to the co-lonial state’s capacity to employ newfound environmental infrastructure to reconfigure its environment and physical territory in dramatic new ways.
The fact of Egypt’s intimate relationship with cotton under Cromer’s rule is well documented.23 What this story omits is the impact of this agricultural formation on regions of the country spatially situated outside the geog-raphy of cotton and perennial irrigation. As one traveled south along the Nile in Egypt, export-oriented cotton cultivation decreased dramatically until it eventually became nonexistent.24 Limited by climate and geogra-phy, most experiments cultivating long-staple exportable cotton south of Asyut did not succeed. Those areas that did not cultivate cotton remained on the periphery of Egypt’s agricultural economy in the early years of the century. The overwhelming dominance of cotton in Egypt’s agricultural economy produced an irrigation infrastructure in which southern Egypt (between Asyut and Aswan) was the last region to be watered by the state.
The new map of irrigation not only included temporal changes related to the frequency of cultivation and watering; it plotted an expansion of the overall agricultural surface area. One explicit objective underlying the dam outlined by colonial irrigation engineers was to expand the area of cultivable land through land reclamation.25 A number of land reclamation companies formed in the early twentieth century and sought to reap the profits of an expanding agricultural economy. At the end of World War I, the capitalization of land mortgage companies amounted to 45 percent of the total capitalization of joint-stock companies operating in Egypt.26 One of the most successful land reclamation schemes was the Wadi Kom Ombo Company. Purchased in 1904, the Kom Ombo plain, located north of Aswan, became a center of sugarcane cultivation and industry in Egypt’s southern-most region. However, while the boom in land reclamation illustrated the primacy of agriculture as profitable business, it also demonstrated a flawed understanding of the environmental processes framing agricultural pro-duction. At first, when land reclamation processes were still being tested, faulty procedures and techniques caused the majority of these ventures to fail. However, by 1913, the failure of most rural land reclamation companies was due to a complex set of causes that included technical difficulties, such as the absence of proper drainage systems, and social and economic issues.27 In order to effectively progress through the process of reclamation, tracts of land needed to be populated as a means of providing agricultural labor.
Many companies did not offer adequate compensation for peasants to
move and settle new land. Moreover, the eagerness to extract a quick profit doomed a number of these schemes as companies sold peasants partially reclaimed land that subsequently reverted to its uncultivable status.
Irrigated, crop-producing land was the raw material for Egypt’s colo-nial economy. However, the colocolo-nial map of Egypt’s agricultural geography extended beyond concrete physical elements like cultivation patterns and irrigation practice to include a more abstract landscape of capital flow. In assessing Egypt’s potential productivity, William Willcocks estimated that one billion cubic meters of water could convert half a million acres to peren-nial irrigation and that the newly irrigated land would produce £15,000,000 of profit.28 British administrators and engineers also employed measures of land and crop value to assess the regional gradations of Egypt’s economy.
Again, from the broader point of view of the general riches of Egypt, the importance of cultivation in the Delta stands far ahead of that of Upper Egypt. Cotton, and especially cotton grown in the Delta, is by far our most valuable crop and the tracts which may be reclaimed in Lower Egypt will be far more valuable, feddan for feddan, than those in the southern part of the country. The best land in the Delta is now worth L.E. 150–
200 per feddan while the best land in Upper Egypt is worth, if it has perennial irrigation, L.E. 100–160 per feddan, and if basin, L.E. 50–60.29
As the intention motivating the dam’s construction was never to diversify Egypt’s agricultural economy but rather to expand cash crop production, measures of land value directly correlated with the flow of irrigation water and the potential for cotton production.30 Thus, the geography of irriga-tion that emerged after 1902 was also marked by a new terrain of value.
As preference was given to Egypt’s north, much of the south continued to follow the system of basin irrigation with its single annual crop. In some respects, this was preferable for peasant cultivators. In the Nile Delta, cot-ton production was associated with the consolidation of property under elite landowners and the trend toward sharecropping among increasing numbers of once independent peasants. The (izba system, in which peas-ants provided the labor necessary to cultivate cash crops on large estates in exchange for a small plot of land, represented the dominant unit of produc-tion in cotton-growing areas of the Nile Delta.31 In southern Egypt, land tenure patterns varied depending on the crop grown and the local history of property sales. In south Minya and north Asyut (central Egypt), large
landowners held more than 50 percent of the cultivable land, peasant wage labor on large farms was prevalent, and cotton covered more than 30 percent of farmland. Much of this land belonged to the former khedivial estates, the Daira Sanieh, and was purchased by large landowners in colonial auctions in the early twentieth century. However, as one moved south of Asyut and the colonial irrigation frontier, cotton cultivation decreased dramatically, eventually becoming nonexistent. Property ownership and labor patterns in southern Egypt were mixed: In some areas, sugarcane was cultivated as a monoculture, and property ownership was characterized by small holdings.
In others, landowners possessing large estates predominated.32
Although the two regions were separate in many respects, the demands and fluctuations of the northern cotton economy influenced the economic realm of southern Egypt. The manpower that fueled the northern cotton economy was in part supplied by southern laborers.33 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the expansion of cash crop production, industrial-ization, and construction associated with growth in Cairo and Alexandria attracted southerners to northern Egypt in search of wage labor as com-parable projects in southern Egypt were relatively sparse. Because many southern peasants cultivated crops according to the seasons of basin ir-rigation, the agricultural calendar facilitated a certain amount of labor mi-gration in the dry season preceding the flood. An interconnected colonial economy developed, in which cash crop production depended on migrant labor from the south. However, the coalescence of this broader economy did not extinguish local economic networks, especially as they thrived in peripheral areas of the state. Portions of Egypt’s south cultivated sugarcane and a distinct economic realm associated with sugarcane cultivation and industry emerged in this region.34