The essays in this issue came together in a completely unplanned though surely serendipitous way, and they collectively exhibit the growing interest in water resources history. The topics extend over several centuries and parts of four continents and, consequently, do not easily coalesce around a certain theme or themes. For this state of affairs we should not blame the authors, who had no idea when they first submitted their essays that that their articles would be brought together to form a “water issue” of Technology and Culture. Yet, more than sufficient justification exists for this collection. Aside from the obvious fact that all of the essays focus on water projects, they also contribute to the history of public works, and here at least one theme emerges that has not received much attention in the history of technology: the ever increasing role of negotiation in public works. If treated at all, negotiations often are considered some sort of insignificant prelude to actual construction. In reality, they have become central to the life of the public works engineer and the key to successful public works engineering.

My own civilian career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirms that engineers often spend more time negotiating than building. In the United States, federal public works negotiations take place in what is loosely called “the planning process,” one that extends from the preparation of feasibility reports, environmental impact statements, cultural resource management studies, and at least preliminary design memoranda to congressional authorization and appropriation. The process usually includes public meetings and scores of smaller discussions with community and political leaders. Similar planning hurdles exist in many other industrialized countries. Obstacles often take years to resolve, if they ever are. Few engineers look forward to this process, which inevitably delays construction and creates new uncertainties, but laws and policy prescribe it and it is ignored at agency peril. Many engineers, and not a few historians, attribute the process to environmental-era legislation and regulations. Quite the contrary, as Paul Dobraszczyk shows in his discussion of Joseph Bazalgette, its roots can easily be seen in mid-nineteenth-century public works planning and certainly go back even further.

Negotiations about public works projects occur regardless of time or place. Exceptions are limited to extremely autocratic regimes, where megalomania is often abundantly evident and the rule of law is not. Even many despotic or totalitarian rulers, however, may invite negotiations within the government and among agencies, but not necessarily with the public or other governments and international organizations (except to obtain funding and technical support). The more transparent and democratic the government, the more likely that negotiations will be comprehensive and protracted. They may embrace government agencies; various levels of government within a country; nations; community, national, and international organizations; and, increasingly, nongovernmental institutions. Negotiations are rarely only about project design or the allocation of administrative authority, but also involve visions of the past and future as expressed in custom, values, and written and oral traditions. This is vividly portrayed in the essays of Heather Hoag and May-Britt Öhman, who examine colonial East Africa; Dianne van Oosterhout, who focuses on colonial Indonesia; and Noyan Dinçkal, who writes about water infrastructure modernization in Istanbul. In all cases, the authors deal with the reconciliation of Western technology and indigenous cultural values. In assessing competing visions, opposing political desires, conflicting science, and often intangible cultural benefits and costs, public works engineers attempt to mediate the incommensurable. Their scale weighs cultural preferences, economic requirements, environmental protection, and various sociopolitical issues at all levels of government. It often requires that the quantitative give way to the qualitative, and the purported objective to the subjective. No wonder that public works engineers find reading the scale difficult and are often accused of tipping it one way or the other. Several of the articles in this issue correctly imply that success in public works requires far more than good engineering; it demands ability to listen, skill to negotiate, capacity for empathy, patience to understand, and willingness to say “no”—both to the government and to the people directly affected.

Broadly speaking, public works are projects that benefit the body politic rather than any one institution, public or private. Before law became so complex, engineering projects so big, and communities so fragmented—in other words, before industrialization—such a definition might have sufficed. In some Western European communities, medieval public works officials may have been simple plumbers who were charged with keeping the hydraulic works functioning, the water free from pollution, and not much more.1 Even this arrangement may have impressed some municipalities as unnecessarily ambitious. Dolly Jørgensen and Esha Shah remind us that public works need not require engineers at all. Jørgensen focuses on maintenance issues in medieval English and Swedish towns. The water technology itself was uncomplicated, and negotiations revolved around the precise responsibilities of the residents and the municipalities to ensure water drainage and waste disposal. These negotiations involved town councilors, homeowners, and perhaps professional pavers, but evidently no engineers. The questions by and large were ones of regulation, not engineering, although clearly the two were, and are, linked. In another part of the world, Shah uses the folk literature of India to show how upper classes negotiated the location of tanks (small irrigation reservoirs), while the lower class Voddas (tank builders) negotiated construction methods among themselves and working conditions with the upper classes and the gods. The Voddas used craft technology—they were artisans, not engineers, yet they built reservoirs that earned plaudits from European engineers centuries later.

During the last two centuries negotiations have become more complicated, as more people and institutions are involved and more demands are made on water infrastructure. As several of the essays show, clashing views over planned projects are rarely confined to questions of technique or effectiveness, but extend to questions regarding whether those who benefit are also those who pay and what the costs, both tangible and intangible, actually are. They also reveal, as Oosterhout and David Biggs suggest, that old cultural baggage is not easily discarded, but often is used—or manipulated—to mobilize support or inspire opposition. Today, in most parts of the world, public works engineers attempt to mediate conflicting views and evidence, and project construction might rest more on negotiating ability than technical proficiency.

In this issue of Technology and Culture, the authors focus on water. They examine dams, irrigation works, and urban water supply, and they discuss numerous project purposes, including urban and agricultural drainage, hydropower, navigation, and flood control. The challenges of water resources development prevail in other public works programs, but the universal need for water—or for protection from it—raises the stakes and magnifies the issues. Success or failure may spell the difference between life and death. This introduction considers how each article furthers our understanding of the role of negotiation in engineering. The following two sections consider negotiations among people and institutions and among stories and traditions. Each section begins with a project that did not involve engineers, but still required negotiation. From there, we turn to several essays that show how negotiations have expanded and how essential public works engineers are to the process. The final section relates political scientist James Scott’s ideas about high modernism to water resources history and uses the Bonneville Dam article by Abbie Liel and David Billington to touch upon the technical negotiations that public works engineers have with other engineers and experts.2

The Engineer as Negotiator: People and Institutions

Dolly Jørgensen peers into an era when negotiations principally occurred among city officials, and the position of public works engineer did not yet exist. Rather, a cooperative association between town leaders and residents ensured the construction and maintenance of pubic works. Jørgensen examines medieval Coventry, Norwich, and York in England and Stockholm, Sweden, to show us how streets were used both for transportation and for water drainage. Town councils passed laws requiring residents to maintain the area in front of their homes to the middle of the street, where a gutter conveyed wastewater. In some cases, householders paid professional pavers to maintain the street. Jørgensen does not describe the qualifications these pavers had, but the fact that paving emerged as a craft with specified skills and standards is noteworthy. The entire system depended on individual households fulfilling obligations that emerged from negotiations within the town councils and between municipal authorities and residents. We may assume that violations increased as cities grew, necessitating closer control and inspection and perhaps eventually the hiring of a public works official to ensure that maintenance duties were properly executed. The author refutes the common perception that medieval streets were used to convey waste as well as water. Municipal councils often provided carts around the town for the collection of waste, including organic matter. Periodically, the carts would be taken out of town and their contents dumped. Officials even employed street cleaners, taxing the householders for this service. One commendable aspect of Jørgensen’s article is the use of both historical and archaeological resources. Archaeological evidence is especially rich in water resources history and deserves more attention from both historians of technology and environmental historians.3

Paul Dobraszczyk brings us closer to the present with his focus on Joseph Bazalgette and the London drainage system. He considers the role of technical representations—both written and pictorial documents—in the construction of the drainage system. These representations were, and are, contained in contracts, instruments of negotiation that the author closely examines.4 Bazalgette’s contracts prescribed both the design and cost of materials and labor; rather than encouraging innovation and efficiency, his primary concern was uniformity. He expected all the bids to be pretty much within a narrow range in terms of both cost and construction of the project. Wide variations from the government estimate showed a lack of understanding of the process. Cost differences largely related to organizational efficiency, logistics, and experience.

An examination of contracts and drawings is a useful way to analyze the evolution of the engineer as negotiator. After Bazalgette’s time, in the UK and elsewhere, technical negotiation became more important as public works engineers increasingly depended on both the resources and resourcefulness of contractors. To eliminate ambiguities and reduce challenges before and after awarding the contract, many large public works agencies employed lawyers, and all had access to them. Excepting the engineering drawings, legal requirements rather than engineering specifications dominated many public works solicitations for work (requests for proposals), and contracts themselves increasingly became instruments of constraint in the twentieth century. Solicitations carefully described the project and often provided legal and land restrictions, but they left it to the bidder to design the project and to provide a cost estimate after careful analysis of the required labor and materials (keeping in mind any government requirements regarding minimum wage or restrictions on suppliers). Under these circumstances, the low bid could be significantly lower or higher than the government estimate. In case of the latter, the government could either reject the bid or seek additional funds. Since Bazalgette, public works projects have become more negotiable from an engineer’s perspective, but less negotiable from a lawyer’s.

Dobraszczyk discusses Bazalgette’s skillful use of well-drafted, colored maps and illustrations to win over opponents and doubters. Hearings before London’s Metropolitan Board of Works to approve designs became almost pro forma, and Bazalgette’s apparent conflicts of interest and cozy relationships with contractors awaited future examination. The drawings also attracted public interest and support for the project. Bazalgette, however, commissioned few photographs to show construction development. In contrast, his counterpart across the Atlantic, army engineer officer Montgomery Meigs, used cameras to document progress on numerous public works in antebellum Washington, D.C., including the Washington water supply system. Historian Mike Chrimes argues that Meigs’s effort was probably “the earliest example of extensive use of photography to record civil engineering projects.”5 Evidently, Bazalgette saw little need for photography other than to complement the engraved illustrations in the Illustrated London News. He could control drawings but not photographs, and his objective was to persuade, not to preserve a visual record.

Bazalgette’s undeniable expertise, organizational ability, political judgment, and institutional connections gained him independence and influence in public and private engineering circles alike. His career shows the public works engineer negotiating with municipal authority, various contractors, interested parties, and the general public. David Biggs’s revealing essay on the Plain of Reeds in Vietnam illustrates a different side of the engineer as negotiator. Biggs analyzes the engineer as a middleman among governments, and between governments and communities. He provocatively suggests that a local mentality heavily shaped by the colonial past subverted the best of American intentions. But the story is complicated and often involves language more than action. “Intermediaries” in Bruno Latour’s sense of the word—people and things that transform meaning as they convey it—take concepts and values with very specific definitions and over time pass these to multiple levels of society. As they do, description often becomes less precise and language more ambiguous.

In Biggs’s narrative, colonial and postcolonial administrations attempted to develop the Plain of Reeds in the Mekong Delta. Before World War II, the French envisioned the relocation of landless peasants to the Plain of Reeds, where they would live in casiers, agricultural settlements surrounded by flood dikes. War and then insurgency put these plans on hold, and in the years following the division of Vietnam in 1954, South Vietnamese president Ngô Æçnh Di¨m increasingly linked economic development to military security, finally coming out with plans to turn casiers into “strategic hamlets.” Meanwhile, American and remaining French engineers used dredges and other expensive equipment, rather than less sophisticated methods, to clear waterways and reclaim land. The costly equipment became a problem because of maintenance and logistics issues and lack of security. In the 1960s, American plans resurrected the earlier, French idea of casiers, but they also displayed sensitivity to local ecosystems and recognized that the development of the Plain of Reeds must be integrated with river basin development along the entire lower Mekong River. Many American engineers and politicians hoped for an American “TVA” in Southeast Asia. This, of course, did not happen. Still, the French casiers concept heavily influenced postcolonial plans, and it continues to do so to the present day. In this way, engineers and institutions put old ideas into new bottles. The theme resonates in other articles in this issue.

Biggs looks at the Plain of Reeds in terms of engineering expertise and political judgment; his focus is local, although he shows how differing local and foreign cultures affect engineering approaches and objectives. What remains is to place the story in the larger framework of development in Southeast Asia. International efforts to develop the Mekong River stretch back at least to just after the end of World War II. Among the institutions involved are the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). An examination of the documents in the French, U.S., and UN archives will allow us to evaluate more accurately the use of engineering expertise at all levels of government. Clearly, insecure governments prize and often try to monopolize professional expertise. Sometimes the motivation is simply to retain in-house expertise not subject to outside influences. Such internal expertise allows governments to lay claim to objectivity, even in instances where the engineering numbers and scientific evidence are contentious. The hope may be that this objectivity will win over public works opponents, who often have their own data. More often, however, public works engineers find that a satisfactory outcome emerges only through protracted negotiations that emphasize the cultural over the technical.

Like Biggs, Heather Hoag and May-Britt Öhman tell a story that bridges colonial and postcolonial administrations. Their essay examines water development in East Africa’s Rufiji River Basin. Here, too, the data collected by British engineers in the colonial period heavily influenced the economic development plans of Tanzania’s new, independent government. Later, national and international aid organizations provided conflicting plans, which sometimes proved seriously inadequate and even professionally suspect. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s dependence on aerial surveys precluded any detailed understanding of basin ecology, and a Swedish study used insufficient hydrological data and analysis. In some cases, the engineers viewed the people and landscape through their own cultural lens, which resulted in inferences at odds with indigenous knowledge and environmental conditions. Through their reports, they served as intermediaries, both transmitting and transforming information. Clearly, a number of engineers failed to appreciate the tenacity of tradition in East Africa or that the fundamental issue in the era of independence was not industrialization (Westernization), but political and cultural sovereignty. Perhaps most important, international development agencies and even the Tanzanian government failed to grasp the fundamental point that indigenous culture and tradition, not foreign values, legitimize change. The studies described by Hoag and Öhman suggest another engineering role: the engineer as historian. Engineers like Alexander Telford and Clement Gillman investigated both social behavior and physical phenomena and often were the first to publish fundamental investigations into both the peoples and natural world of a river basin. In the United States, the so-called 308 Reports produced by the Army Corps of Engineers similarly provided reams of data on both the social and physical characteristics of scores of river basins. These investigations often serve as the starting points for historical research and, in the absence of any anthropological and scientific investigations, may prove critical. The ability to integrate disparate lines of inquiry into a narrative history thus becomes another useful analytical skill for engineers, one that unfortunately is little appreciated.

The essay by Hoag and Öhman complements Biggs’s. In both cases, colonial and postcolonial engineers communicate between the authorities and the local population. Hoag and Öhman implicitly raise, but do not answer, questions dealing with coordination within the independent Tanzanian bureaucracy. A study of internal discussions among the Rufiji Basin Development Authority, the Tanzanian Water Development and Irrigation Division (Ministry of Agriculture), and the Ministry of Water and Mineral Resources might give us a more nuanced view of the Tanzanian response to Western engineering plans. While both articles primarily reveal the engineer as a negotiator among people and institutions, they also uncover the engineer as negotiator among stories and traditions. This latter theme is more explicitly treated in the articles by Shah, Dinçkal, and Oosterhout, to which we now turn.

The Engineer as Negotiator: Stories and Traditions

As with Dolly Jørgensen, Esha Shah brings us back to preindustrial times. She argues that precolonial scientific and technological knowledge in India cannot be reduced to simplistic contextual comparisons with European, especially British colonial, knowledge. Rather, traditional folk literature, temple inscriptions, and other textual evidence illuminate past social activities, including her focus, the construction of Indian tanks (small irrigation reservoirs behind earthen embankments), beginning in the first centuries CE. Her sources are not modern planning reports, policy statements, and blueprints. Instead, she relies on oral tradition, songs, and written folktales replete with human sacrifice, gods, and various monsters. The Voddas (tank builders), a lower caste, constructed the tanks. They were skilled artisans, but not engineers, and it is difficult to know how much actual engineering occurred in the abstract, Western sense—possibly none. Instead, the laborers worked from memory, practical experience, and knowledge of the land. The number of tanks grew exponentially as more land came under cultivation. Higher-caste leaders and priests chose the locations, oversaw the work, and paid the workers. Here, negotiations occurred among castes, within separate castes, and between castes and priests and, according to folk traditions, castes and gods.

Folk literature provides much evidence about how the tanks were constructed, for what purpose, and with what limitations. The tales and songs do not always agree, as one might expect when some stories come from the Voddas and others from the higher castes. Nevertheless, they serve as important sources for the history of the tanks. British engineer W. G. Bligh inspected the tanks in the early twentieth century and confirmed the essential soundness of their construction as revealed in the folk literature. Archaeologist Kathleen Morrison reached the same conclusion at the end of the century. Shah suggests that the literature is unclear about the level of coercion applied to the Voddas or whether their grievances over pay were justified or not. What is clear is that values congenial to a stratified and often violent society are embedded in the history of the tank system. Moreover, the folktales that transmit so much of the history mix the secular and the spiritual. One can hardly avoid comparing this literature with the biblical description of the Hebrews building the monuments of ancient Egypt. Shah’s effort encourages a closer look at what folk literature may tell us about technology—and what anthropology has to offer to historians of technology. While space prohibits any comparison here, an analysis of the ways in which modern-day engineers bear some of the same negotiating burdens as premodern artisans opens the door to an exploration of the ways that technical expertise is disseminated, exploited, and acquired in human communities.

David Nye’s work suggests another promising way to look at the Indian folk literature. His insights about“Second Creation” technological narratives in the United States perhaps can be applied to what might be called “technotales”—folk stories about work and technology.6 For instance, in what ways, if any, did these Indian folktales explain the assimilation of nature into a technological system, and to what end did the system exist? What cultural values did they convey and what, if any, developmental process did they explain? In what way did they conflate the spiritual and the secular to explain technological advance? It may be that many of these tales lack the optimism essential to Nye’s technological narratives, but that should not preclude assessing their value in establishing the degree and purpose of human (including engineering) intervention in the natural world. Cultural conflict is a recurring theme in folktales, and as Noyan Dinçkal discusses in his article on the Istanbul water system, it is also a theme in technological history. In this case, Western engineers played the contradictory role of transferring a self-consciously European water technology to Istanbul while also ensuring the continuance of the city’s traditional public fountains. With funding provided by charitable endowments, these fountains numbered in the hundreds and had been built over several centuries prior to the so-called era of reform in the mid-nineteenth century. They not only provided free water, but also served as centers of public space; many were embellished in a highly artistic manner. Dinçkal maintains that they rivaled mosques in cultural importance.

However, by the nineteenth century, population increase and severe financial problems created havoc with the city’s water supply. There was not enough water for either domestic consumption or firefighting; conduits were neither extended nor maintained. In the 1870s, Istanbul authorities decided it was time to modernize using Western technologies and a centralized water system. The step would resolve water issues while at the same time proclaiming the Ottoman capital an enlightened and progressive city. Still, tradition was to be given its due. Turkish officials negotiated agreements with French companies that, in exchange for the right to build and operate a new centralized water system, required the companies to provide free water to meet various public needs, including schools, fire hydrants, hospitals, and the fountains. Additionally, the agreements required the companies to build fountains at specified locations, thus guaranteeing that public fountains would continue and increase in number. The stipulations obviously undermined efforts to privatize the water system, and, as service was extended to all parts of the city, the companies faced financial problems. Aside from Europeans and wealthy Ottoman Turks, who eagerly emulated Western ways, few residents agreed to become customers and pay for tap water when they could obtain free water at the fountains.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Istanbul had a hybrid water system: one part tradition, one part European. Municipal authorities built a new water main in 1902 that added to the heterogeneity. The new main principally supplied water to the fountains and public institutions. Then, after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the municipal administration took control of the water system and faced major public health problems resulting from the poor quality water and deteriorating conditions at the public fountains. Authorities, too, were anxious to continue the modernization of their city and to connect households to a central water system. Consequently, by midcentury, most public fountains had been closed. They had lost their social significance as well as functional usefulness, and their demise marked the end of a tradition reaching back centuries.

The modernization of Istanbul’s water system required the transfer of cultural and technological values from Western Europe, and that in turn required negotiations with European water companies. Apparently, the municipal authorities paid far more attention to the districts to be served than to the manner of construction. According to Dinçkal, they specified which districts would receive taps, but prescribed little regarding the number of households to be served or the exact extent of the water system. The new system also conveyed numerous and conflicting meanings to Istanbul’s jumbled population. Many residents preferred to retain the old Ottoman public fountains, not simply because they were free, but also because of their highly artistic style and their use in religious ceremonies. Until the municipal administration pushed through the completion of the water system, primarily for public health reasons, cultural fragmentation, not technological obstacles, delayed universal acceptance of Western water technology and management.

In comparison, Dianne van Oosterhout’s narrative tells of the grafting of European sensibilities onto an indigenous technology, helping to imbue it with perceived values that facilitated its resurrection decades later. The subject is the waduks of the Netherlands East Indies. The waduk is a small reservoir used for irrigation, similar to Indian water tanks. Dutch irrigation engineers, who had replaced local village water lords by the end of the nineteenth century, thought that the construction and regulation of waduks might lead to a more equitable allocation of water, improve productivity, and insulate growers from arbitrary decisions by local leaders and colonial administrators. Water would be stored in the reservoirs at night and distributed during the day.7 Both small farmers, who grew mainly rice, and large, European sugar plantation operators would profit. The Dutch constructed these waduks in the early twentieth century in the sugar-producing parts of Java. Whether the reservoirs would provide all the benefits envisioned was an open question. Since their origins were indigenous, dating back to the precolonial period, they fit prevailing cultural preferences in favor of small-scale, local technology. Yet they proved particularly vulnerable to abuse, since under cover of darkness upstream farmers would block the flow of water from the tanks. Thus, results were mixed. Thievery eventually declined, and the new allocation of water encouraged the cultivation of secondary (non-rice) crops. Still, some farmers refused to cooperate; they evidently feared repercussions from either authorities or the sugar plantation owners. Nor did the waduk system prove as economically efficient as hoped. While Oosterhout reports that by 1919, 342 waduks had been put in operation, the experiment eventually failed. Although a technologically sound idea, the system became too costly, and so many farmers opposed the regulation that the system never became viable. Moreover, the Dutch began to favor large-scale over local irrigation projects. Perhaps the major problem, Oosterhout argues, was that the engineers never valued the local context and never solicited the views of farmers and local elites. Engineers should have served as intermediaries between the government and the local community, but instead they subordinated the indigenous social context to their own technological values. It seems clear, although Oosterhout does not explicitly state it, that the engineers’ reports that reached higher administrative levels conveyed far more technical language than the views of local communities.

Oosterhout’s essay continues with the era of independence. At first, irrigation works decayed, but in the period following President Suharto’s takeover of the government, a new interest in improving irrigation emerged. The government planned numerous large-scale projects, some of which involved the construction of reservoirs far larger than those created during the period prior to independence. Still, the new reservoirs were also called waduks. They served irrigation, but often other needs became paramount, such as electricity, flood control, and even recreation. Their construction sometimes required the resettlement of villages. Suharto, Oosterhout shows, suggested that these waduks came from traditional technological knowledge and that now was the time to “restore” them. Given the substantial differences between the new and old waduks, this claim stretched credibility, but it clearly resonated with many Indonesians. In West Java, farmers built smaller waduks more closely resembling their colonial counterparts. The construction of the waduks in part resulted from the conviction that the technology not only better suited the people’s needs, but also elevated moral order. In other words, the colonial past was more just and less corrupt than Suharto’s Indonesia—or, as Oosterhout puts it, the sentiment sprang from a collective “romanticization of the colonial past.” Indeed, early-twentieth-century waduks evoked sentiment and imagery far more enduring than the waduks themselves. A system that had failed to eliminate all abuses, increase production, or substantially enhance the local economy helped legitimize developments that occurred more than half a century later. In a sense, Dutch colonial engineers negotiated better with future communities than with those they actually dealt with.

High Modernism

Today, hardly any academic discussion of government’s relationship to public works escapes mention of James Scott’s idea of high modernism, and three of the articles in this issue (Shah, Hoag and Öhman, and Biggs) explicitly refer to it, although not always with approval. Scott includes in high modernism a confident belief in scientific and technological progress, expanding production, rational design of social order, growing satisfaction of human needs, and increasing control of nature. He believes that all these characteristics emerged in industrializing Europe and North America in the period roughly from 1830 until World War I.8 Readers of this journal will recognize that high modernism largely replicates the engineering orthodoxy that held sway by the end of the nineteenth century.9 The interesting point for us to consider is that Biggs, Hoag and Öhman, and Shah do not embrace Scott’s argument it its entirety, but they do use it as a kind of counterpoint to their own theses. In other words, Scott’s definitions and construction carry weight even if his overall contribution may be deficient in one respect or another. Thus, Hoag and Öhman note Scott’s use of the term “legible” to describe waterways that are,in their words, “knowable and controllable” (and—the larger point—capable of being manipulated). Shah suggests that Scott’s use of the Greek term me¯tis to describe local practical skills very nearly describes premodern traditional knowledge, such as that which the Voddas exhibited. Biggs more broadly rejects Scott’s high-modernist concept as an explanation for the failure of American nation-building in Vietnam. Instead, he argues that local actors influenced by colonial conditions undermined and transformed American intentions.

Ironically, nothing is mentioned of high modernism in the one article in this issue that most fully captures its essence: Abbie Liel and David Billington’s essay on Bonneville Dam. Here was a project that not only altered land and water, but also helped transform the entire economy and society of the Pacific Northwest. It mobilized science and technology to answer numerous challenging engineering issues, and it placed the national government— through the Army Corps of Engineers—squarely in the driver’s seat.

The authors emphasize innovations at Bonneville Dam in concrete mix, spillway design, and a new water turbine. Undeniably, these innovations were engineering achievements that reflect well on the Corps of Engineers. Yet a bit of historical context suggests that these innovations occurred within an established institutional framework that departed little from typical Corps organization and procedures. For instance, the Corps’ increasing dependence on civilian experts began in the immediate post–Civil War era.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, many of these experts were hired temporarily for work on specific projects. Some, such as Hugh Cooper at Wilson Dam, were hired as consultants, but in no ways did hiring an outside consultant—even one with substantial supervisory authority such as Cooper—reduce the Corps’ responsibility for approving designs and overseeing project construction. In another example, the use of models to resolve design issues extended back to the construction of Ohio River locks in the late nineteenth century, and Gatun Dam in Panama and Wilson Dam on the Tennessee River in the early twentieth.10 Four years before the commencement of the Bonneville Dam project, the agency had begun building a major hydraulics laboratory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had already performed some model investigations. Also, the Corps’ experience in constructing fish ladders did not begin on the Columbia River but goes back to the Potomac River in the 1870s.11 Finally, during the same decade that Bonneville Dam was constructed, Corps personnel, occasionally with the support of outside consultants and university laboratories, produced numerous innovations dealing with lock and dam combinations on the Ohio and upper Mississippi rivers and with multipurpose dams on the Missouri River. Any assessment of engineering contributions at Bonneville Dam must acknowledge a Corps history that transcends both the New Deal and the Columbia River.

Beyond the question of context, an even greater challenge beckons: crediting the right people for innovations, or even identifying when the innovations first appeared. If Isaac Newton “stood on the shoulders of giants,” most engineers stand on the shoulders of hundreds, if not thousands, of predecessors in their profession. Attribution thus becomes difficult. In this regard, public works agencies may pose special problems. Within these agencies, nameless and subordinate engineers, consultants, and contractors can make a huge difference in both structural and mechanical innovations and project design. The research challenge is daunting. Aside from careful inspection of the technical literature, which may extend the research back for decades, historians must also examine agency policies, rules, regulations, organizational structure, and even operational philosophy. Their research should include agency archival material, including meeting minutes and technical and political correspondence and memoranda. In the United States, federal agency material is often scattered among the regional offices of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), making the research task even more difficult. In this regard, most unpublished agency archival material dealing with Bonneville Dam is at the Seattle regional office of NARA, and an examination of the documents there would certainly have enhanced the story that Liel and Billington relate.

When they track the story of innovation, historians often find one more story of negotiation, this time more technical in nature, at least partly performed out of public view, and in recent decades strongly interdisciplinary in character. Negotiations can be marked by collaboration at one point, competition at another. Sometimes, of course, even the most conscientious analysis of the documents may yield frustratingly meager results. Yet historical investigation can offer something even more rewarding than the identification of individual engineering contributions. Agency policies and regulations respond to political requirements, cultural values, professional standards, and agency self-image. As such, they establish the formal rules of negotiation within the agency and between the agency and outside engineers and experts (and, of course, politicians and stakeholders); they provide valuable insights into the practice of high modernism within the government. A close reading reveals boundaries between liberty and authority, centralization and decentralization, and technical expert and politician. Such an examination helps us to understand and define the political process.12

Any analysis of engineering negotiations in the public works arena necessitates some modification of Scott’s high-modernist concept. At a minimum, the articles in this issue suggest that successful engineering requires more than the application of scientific rationalization. Indeed, rather than pushing politics to the side, as high-modernist ideology prescribes, modern public works negotiations often place politics—meaning here the often conflicting relationships among social groups—squarely in the middle of any discussion about a project. Consequently, social input—irrelevant in high modernism—becomes a key feature of negotiations. Nor can engineers focus only on the future, as high modernists are inclined to do. Aside from the fact that engineers depend on prior surveys and examinations to supplement their own site inspections and analyses, successful engineers take into account indigenous knowledge, cultural biases, and patterns of living, all products of historical evolution. Finally, it will come as little surprise to many public works engineers that social-engineering projects imposed from above have little chance of success, as Scott points out.13 None of this means that the institutions that employ engineers necessarily will follow engineering advice, or that government policies and funding will support engineers’ requests to obtain local information or expand the scope of investigations; the articles on East Africa, Indonesia, and Vietnam inform us otherwise.

What it does suggest is that public works engineers around the world are linked by common experiences that do not correspond with high-modernist ideology. The ways in which these experiences are reconciled with high modernism deserves more historical analysis. Similarly, Scott’s book provides a starting point for examining the intersection of modern Western technique, rooted in theory and mathematical rationalization, with me¯tis, the practical knowledge and skills found at the local level. In defining technological advances, we tend to focus on artifacts, on things, on “boys and their toys.” But in defining the art of engineering, we must pay more attention to a negotiating process that does not always end in a project, but nevertheless is an intrinsic part of engineering activity. Without understanding the engineer as negotiator, we cannot hope to understand public works engineering as a profession. Every engineer brings to negotiations a vision formed from experience, training, imagination, and cultural inferences. In the case of water projects, the vision usually involves transforming nature’s order into a second order that is publicly financed, serves a social need, and involves manipulation of a natural resource. The control of water may include dams, locks, levees, floodwalls, pumps, pipes, channels and ditches, diversion structures, water-and waste-treatment plants, turbines, and chemical and mechanical water purification technology. These are the products of the water resources engineer, but whether they are used or the project is built at all can be decided only after engineers modify their vision through negotiations with one another and with other interested parties. This negotiated vision becomes the raw material of design. It reconciles tradition and technique, the past and future, with tradition often gaining more influence than engineers had originally contemplated. Negotiations explore the possible, define project meaning, and test engineering imagination. Over time and in locations near and remote, negotiations change the very nature of public works engineering and of what people expect of engineers.

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1. Roberta J. Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 2001), 118–21.

2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998).

3. Historians who have exploited archaeological resources in water history include Magnusson (n. 1 above); Dora P. Crouch, Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities (Oxford, 1993); Trevor Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (London, 1989); André E. Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800 (College Station, Tex., 1988); Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Baltimore, 1983), and subsequent articles; Louis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 1: Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville, Va., 1979); and Patrick M. Malone, Canals and Industry: Engineering in Lowell, 1821–1880 (Lowell, Mass., 1983), and subsequent studies and articles. Archaeological resources for historians also include cultural resource management (CRM) reports prepared, usually by archaeologists, for various U.S. public works agencies prior to project construction. See also the reports, photographs, and illustrations of the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER). For online access, go to (accessed 6 May 2008). There are also numerous articles dealing with water projects in IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology and in American Canals: Bulletin of the American Canal Society.

4. Historian Mike Chrimes first drew attention to the importance of Bazalgette’s contract documents and drawings; according to Chrimes, “the printed contract documents and lithographed contract drawings were part of a meticulous attention to detail in the contract procedure which are the basis of civil engineering contracts today.” See Chrimes, Civil Engineering, 1839–1889: A Photographic History (Phoenix Mill, U.K., 1991), 87–88.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

7. Maurits Ertsen calls the waduks “night reservoirs” and provides a Dutch spelling for the word, nachtwadoeks; see Ertsen, Prescribing Perfection: Emergence of an Engineering Irrigation Design Approach in the Netherlands East Indies and Its Legacy, 1830–1990 (Rotterdam, 2005), 91–93.

8. Scott (n. 2 above), 89–90.

9. On this point, see Edwin T. Layton Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, 1971), esp. 53–78.

10. On early corps analytical techniques, see Martin Reuss, “The Art of Scientific Precision: River Research in the United States Army Corps of Engineers to 1945,” Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 292–323.

11. Frank N. Schubert, “From the Potomac to the Columbia: The Corps of Engineers and Anadromous Fisheries,” unpublished draft (December 1978). Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia.

12. For a discussion of the parameters molding water resources development in the United States, see Martin Reuss, “The Development of American Water Resources: Planners, Politicians, and Constitutional Interpretation,” in Managing Water Resources: Past and Present, ed. Julie Trottier and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2004), 51–71.

13. Scott (n. 2 above), 94–95, 340.

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Dr. Reuss retired from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2006, after having served as the senior historian, water resources, for over twenty-five years. Presently he is a consulting historian and continues his research and writing on water history. He expresses his appreciation to Suzanne Moon for her critical eye, encouraging words, and welcome suggestions.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.