Water and Politics: Manipulating the Waters of Egypt from the 18th Century through to the Present
Panel 198, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 10:30 am
Panel Description
The management of water as a resource that is both limited and transboundary in nature has become a topic of great interest in the Middle East. Drawing together papers that explore how water resources have been utilized in Egypt from the 18th century through the present day, this panel probes the politics surrounding use of this critical resource. Grounded in close understandings of the hydrological environment in question, the four papers offer multi-disciplinary perspectives on the ways in which different actors have used and continue to use the waters of the Nile for various political and economic ends. The panel builds on the regional literature that has focused primarily on national struggles over transboundary water resources and state-led programs to manipulate these resources, extending it in two respects. Firstly, the panel spans time, bringing a paper that analyzes 18th century Ottoman court records on irrigation maintenance into conversation with papers that explore colonial water projects of the late 19th/early 20th century, post-independence dam building in the mid 20th century, and the ethnographic dynamics of water policy making in the 21st century. This temporal perspective provides valuable insights into how conceptions of the Nile and the ways in which it should be used have changed through time. Secondly, the panel spans space, looking beyond national narratives to consider not only those who use the water in the fields but also the international political-economic context in which decisions are made about what this water should be used for. The papers will address two primary questions:
• How has the nature of Egypt’s water resources been reconfigured in time and space by different actors for various political and economic ends?
• How does the reconfiguration of those water resources, in turn, generate new forms of politics?
In exploring these questions, this panel will provide a valuable contribution to the MESA program, offering new insights into the environmental politics of the Middle East, which is a relatively under-researched area of Middle Eastern studies. The panel will also address the broader theoretical concern of how resources both make and are made by political action.
Through an examination of irrigation in eighteenth-century Ottoman Fayyoum, this paper analyzes how Egyptian peasants and Ottoman bureaucrats negotiated, managed, and used water. Water in the agriculturally rich countryside of Fayyoum—the most productive region of Ottoman Egypt outside the Nile Valley and Delta—was both extremely limited and clearly fundamental to the cultivation of foodstuffs for various cities and towns in Egypt itself and for the wider Ottoman polity of which it was an inextricable part. Fayyoum’s entire supply of fresh water during the Ottoman period came from a single canal branching off of the Nile and, thus, regulating this canal proved of the gravest political, economic, and ecological importance for both the Ottoman bureaucracy of Egypt and for Fayyoum’s peasant population.
The single largest and most important irrigation feature on this canal was the Dam of al-Gharaq. Relying mainly on Ottoman imperial orders sent from Istanbul to Egypt about this dam, I show how the accumulation of silt behind the dam and the threat of its collapse structured the relationship between Fayyoum and the Ottoman Empire. For example, peasants in Fayyoum were able to petition the Ottoman state and to leverage its power and resources to fix this dam when it was in need of repair. And similarly the Ottoman state diverted resources from various regions of the Empire (wood from Anatolia and rope from Cairo for example) to repair this dam.
Furthermore, my reliance on Ottoman imperial orders sent from Istanbul to Egypt is meant to suggest how Egyptian and Ottoman historians can use Ottoman archival materials to narrate the history of rural Egypt. The case of water in Fayyoum is a particularly good example of the utility of these documents since the court records of Beni Suef (the administrative subprovince to which Fayyoum belonged) are not extant.
By combining an environmental history of water in Fayyoum with a discussion of Ottoman imperial practice in a provincial setting, this paper will be of interest to Middle East environmental historians and Egyptian and Ottoman historians alike.
In the early 1930s, two public works projects changed the face of agriculture and land distribution in the south of Egypt. A barrage was constructed at Naj` Hammadi in 1930 and in 1933, the Aswan dam (khazan Aswan) was raised for a second time. The result of these two projects was the arrival of perennial irrigation and increased opportunities in land reclamation in the area of Upper Egypt stretching Qina to Aswan. For the first three decades of the twentieth century, this region had been excluded from state-sponsored irrigation and the cotton-based agricultural economy that it supported.
The exclusion of Egypt’s south from perennial irrigation shaped the history of this region in distinct ways: Land landowners and private agricultural companies, like the Egyptian Sugar Company, exercised tremendous economic and political authority, sugarcane flourished as a cash crop alternative to cotton, and private parties funded the construction of infrastructure. The completion of the Naj` Hammadi barrage and the second heightening of the dam signaled the state’s intervention in the allocation of water and the expansion of cultivable land in the south of Egypt.
Using documents from the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, specifically the Irrigation Department, and articles in the Egyptian press, this paper traces the significance of water, and its increased availability in southern Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s, pursuing the following questions: How did newly available water transform economic relations between peasant cultivators, large landowners, and the state? Second, how did this water change land tenure patterns in Upper Egypt? Finally, did the role of water in peasants’ relationship to land and agricultural production shift as its availability increased?
This paper explores the transnational networks of hydraulic and economic expertise that shaped Egypt’s decision to build the High Dam. The High Dam project was part of a wider effort, led by the Free Officers’ regime, to undertake an ambitious social and economic transformation, guided by principles of economic independence and social welfare, and that was to be achieved through centralized planning. Conventional studies of the High Dam emphasize its expression of state-guided development and the centralization of state power and insist that authoritarian regimes like Nasser’s were motivated by ideological imperatives that compromised sound technical and economic judgment. By contrast, this paper investigates the appeal of the High Dam project by looking at a wider set of ideas and practices in water management, that were common to industrialized and developing countries alike. To provide a fuller account of these transnational linkages, this paper look specifically at two forms of knowledge that were most influential: river-basin development and economic statistics. The paper draws primarily on the writings of some of the experts that were involved in formulating the High Dam project in its early stages. I will examine the economic and technical arguments that they used to support the building of the High Dam and show how these differed from earlier twentieth-century arguments about river control and water supply.
This paper explores the politics of water scarcity in Egypt. Tracking the flow of water from the Nile, through a series of dams and barrages, 30,000km of public canals and 80,000km of private canals to the farmers’ fields, this paper focuses on the politics surrounding the distribution and use of water in Egypt, probing the spaces of scarcity and those of plenty. The paper brings together the diverse set of actors who have a stake in this resource, from the farmers who use it in the fields, to the policy makers who plan for its use, and the donors who have their own perspectives on how the resource should be managed. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, living in a village in Fayoum governorate and working within the Fayoum Irrigation Department, and interviews with policy makers and donors in Cairo, this paper examines three central questions. Firstly, how is water scarcity variously understood by international donors working in water-related programs, officials in the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation’s central and regional departments, academics, and farmers? Secondly, how and for whom is water scarcity variously experienced in Egypt’s agricultural sector? Thirdly, how is scarcity deployed by different actors as a political tool? In answering these questions and drawing on in-depth fieldwork, I seek a nuanced look at an issue which has come to dominate discussions of water resources in the Middle East.
