The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt by Jennifer L. Derr

Abstract

In 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established to manage and develop the Nile Basin waters. The NBI has fostered and facilitated dialogue among its ten member states since its inception, but tension over the use of the Nile waters remains high. Many countries continue to build large hydroelectric projects in the basin without the agreement of other countries. Egypt has argued that it has a right to a continuous volume of water and has threatened to use military force to guarantee that right. Other factors, particularly climate change, are also undermining the volume and predictability of water supplies in the basin. Access to basin waters is especially in demand to improve national and regional electricity supplies and irrigation and, ultimately, to transform and improve the quality of life of basin residents. But how do these regional and national interventions manifest at the individual and community levels? How do citizens and communities, willingly or not, become subjected to these transformations in their everyday lives? The Lived Nile provides an enthralling and critical historical examination of these questions. The book examines the transformation of the Nile into a perennial source of water for irrigation to support a colonial and postcolonial economy in Egypt. This transformation was not achieved simply through the construction and expansion of dams, barrages, and canals but through the interplay between global and domestic capital, colonial authorities and domestic elites, foreign and Egyptian engineers and physicians, and, ultimately, the lives of Egyptian “bodies.” The book goes beyond “the history of Egypt’s colonial economy from the vantage point of its primary commodity [cotton] and social relations of rural Egypt” to focus on the “environmental transformations that enabled it” (3). One of the most important contributions of the book is to bring the reader’s attention to how the creation of the “perennial Nile” was experienced by rural Egyptians—“the complex ways in which rural populations and experts alike were rendered subjects of the colonial economy through their entanglements with the river that watered it” (13). Derr does this using extensive and impressive archival evidence, particularly British, French, and Egyptian sources. Each of the five main chapters illustrates how the technical transformation of the Nile was intertwined with the lives of Egyptians. But the chapters can also stand on their own as individual arguments, moving from a critical history of