It can be depressing these days to read about the state of the world’s water supplies. Any online search will dredge up all kinds of disquieting statistics. No less than two-thirds of the world’s population faces severe water shortage at least one month of the year, with another half billion suffering from it year-round. According to the UN, the demand of freshwater will outstrip supply by more than 40% by 2030. And to make matters worse, a rising tide of industrial, agricultural, and household pollution has prompted agencies like the World Bank to declare an ‘invisible water crisis’.
These are global problems, but they are undoubtedly most acute in the so-called global south, where population is growing fastest and water infrastructures are least robust. Nearly 90% of the 1.8 billion people exposed to high flood risks are in low- and middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia also register by far the highest vulnerability to drought. What’s more, climate change is exacerbating the problems by generating more extreme patterns of precipitation, particularly in regions already characterized by pronounced wet and dry seasons. After all, water is the main medium through which the effects of climate change are manifested in the environment and experienced in everyday life, generally in the form of too much or too little of it.
As pressing as these challenges are today, they have a long history, and so do the technological fixes that are usually applied in response—large-scale dams, canals, dikes, and irrigation schemes. In many ways, they are all rooted in the history of European empire.
One of biggest planned water projects in the world today is the Transaqua Scheme (or Lake Chad Replenishment Scheme), first proposed by the Italian engineering firm Bonifica in the 1970s. With a current price tag of over 50 billion dollars, it proposes to dam all of the Congo River’s right tributaries from the Kotto River southwards and carry the water north via a 2,400-kilometer canal. The basic rationale is to prevent Lake Chad from drying up as a result of excessive irrigation draw-offs and climate change. In addition, the project also claims to provide a host of other benefits: generating electricity, creating new industrial towns, offering cheap inland transport, and even humidifying the climate in parts of the Sahel—which, so the argument goes, will create jobs for farmers and fishermen who have been recruited into armed groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State due to the effects of the shrinking lake.
In recent years the EU, UN, and China have signaled an interest in supporting Transaqua, but the project remains controversial. Critics worry that it will effectively ‘grab’ water supplies from the DRC, Central African Republic and Congo Republic, and that exotic fish species moving from the rivers to Lake Chad could wreck its remaining fisheries. Local people are understandably concerned about its social and environmental impacts and what say, if any, they will have in the design. Most fundamentally, geo-scientists maintain that Lake Chad is not ‘disappearing’ at all. Although no one doubts that temperatures in the region are rising and that climate stress is fueling the conflicts there, the lake itself is undergoing normal water level fluctuations over a longer time scale. The idea that human-made desertification is the root cause of the problem has proven extraordinarily persistent despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
What does this have to do with the history of empire? There are some intriguing echoes from the past here, for such climate engineering efforts are by no means just a recent phenomenon, and nor are ideas about human-made desertification in arid parts of Africa.
In the late nineteenth century, the French army surveyor François Élie Roudaire proposed a scheme to flood 13,000 km2 of the Sahara in Algeria. The plan first took shape in 1872-3 while Roudaire was surveying the depressions that line the northern reaches of the desert, which explorers had long surmised to be part of the ancient Sea of Triton, a large inland gulf that appeared in ancient chronicles but had supposedly dried out over the last two millennia. Roudaire determined that the depressions were indeed below sea level and proposed a series of canals to link them with the Gulf of Gabès on the Tunisian coast to recreate the supposedly long-lost Sea. As audacious as the plan was, it was taken very seriously at the time. Roudaire convinced the French Académie des Sciences to fund a series of expeditions and the idea became a popular sensation in the boulevard press.
Like Transaqua today, the Saharan Sea scheme was attractive because it promised numerous benefits at once. Strategically, it would open up the interior to French commerce and block the way northward for desert groups that still resisted French rule. Politically, it would demonstrate the benefits of French rule to local people and display French technological prowess to an international public. The most important effects, however, would be hydro-climatic. According to Roudaire and his backers, restoring such a large water surface would increase humidity and rainfall throughout the region, thus re-establishing the climatic conditions that had once made North Africa the ‘granary of Rome’ before Arab pastoralists had supposedly desiccated it through land clearance and overgrazing. The idea that Arab peoples had altered North Africa’s climate after the fall of Rome was a total myth, but during French colonial rule it was a powerful one that served to justify land confiscation and European settlement in Algeria.
And (once again) like Transaqua today, the project was contentious. Critics doubted that the depressions had ever been connected to the sea. Some thought that the high evaporation rates would quickly dry the sea out again, others that it would do little more than transform productive oases into malarial swamps. Despite strong support from the colonial lobby and the engineer-celebrity Ferdinand de Lesseps (creator of the Suez Canal), an 1882 study by the Académie des Sciences finally concluded that the costs would greatly outweigh the benefits and duly pulled the plug. The decision almost certainly saved the French state and investors a major loss, but Monsieur Roudaire was devastated. He withdrew from public life, turned to alcohol, and died in 1885 aged only 49.
It would be easy to disregard this as nothing more than a history that never was, but in several ways it repays closer attention. For one thing, it illustrates the remarkable technological optimism and determination to improve nature that characterized the high age of empire. It also demonstrates the widespread perception of colonized lands as a blank canvas for engineering designs, with little thought to what locals actually wanted.
Perhaps most importantly, the ideas and impulses that underpinned the Saharan Sea project never really disappeared. There were calls to revive the plan in 1911-12 and again during the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s, when French engineers proposed to detonate a string of 20-mega-ton hydrogen bombs to blast the required canals. As late as the 1980s, the Algerian and Tunisian governments commissioned a Swedish study that concluded that it was technically feasible but financially unsound. Furthermore, the Saharan Sea was by no means the only idea along these lines. Ever since the 1920s there have been calls to flood the Qattara Depression in western Egypt to generate hydro-electricity, humidify the climate, and create new agricultural land. Grandest of all was Herman Sörgel’s ‘Atlantropa’ scheme of the 1930s, which proposed to dam the Strait of Gibraltar to generate electricity, lower the level of the Mediterranean, and irrigate vast swathes of the Sahara, thus improving the climate and creating huge areas of farmland for European settlement.
It is unclear whether the Transaqua scheme will ever make it off the drawing board. But it is abundantly clear that such hydraulic mega-projects have a long and troubled genealogy. What François Elie Roudaire would make of it is anyone’s guess, but surely he would see much in it that seemed familiar: the political and cultural fascination with grandiose hydro-projects; the dream of climate engineering through massive water transfers; and not least, the tendency of outside experts to view environments in the ‘developing world’ as a laboratory for creating what they—and not necessarily local people—regard as an improved version of nature.
As Liquid Empire seeks to show, many of our engrained habits of dealing with water, and many of humanity’s greatest water vulnerabilities, are deeply entwined with the history of empire. If we want to create a more water-secure world, we need to overcome some of the legacies of the colonial past.
Corey Ross is director of the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His books include Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World.