Colonising for cotton

Perennial irrigation was far from just an Egyptian affair. Grains levied from peasants were sold on European markets to finance the manufactured goods and labour for construction of new canals, pumps and railways. The conscription of Egyptian farmers, the Ottoman conquest of Sudan for providing slaves (1821), and the forced production of cotton would tie millions Egyptians and Sudanese into the British imperial economy. Not only would cotton cultivation make farmers themselves increasingly dependent on food and fertilizer from foreign markets; to finance the expansion of cotton infrastructure, the Ottoman rulers sold land to European investors and turned communal lands into private property that could be taxed (Tignor 1966, Mitchell 2002). Through heavy taxation, the expansion of Egyptian irrigated agriculture from 840 thousand hectare to 2 million hectare over the 19^th century was mortgaged on an increasing peasant indebtedness (Richards 1982, p39). Failing to pay the debt, more and more smallholders saw their lands appropriated by national and foreign estate holders, who let them produce subsistence crops on part of the land in exchange of their labour on cotton fields. When a global economic crisis hit in the 1870s and mass revolt threatened European investments, the British army took over and occupied Egypt in 1882. The decades that followed would bring new dams and irrigation schemes to the Nile at an unprecedented scale.

The massive expansion of perennial irrigation for cotton production created modern concerns of water shortage. No longer was cultivation dependent on the height of the Nile flood, instead it became dependent on volume of summer water available for cotton cultivation. As the cotton season stretched from March to October, the area that could be irrigated was limited by the amount of water in the Nile before the flood season started in July. Because storage of large amounts of water on the flat Delta plain would require large reservoirs which would be costly to construct, take up valuable space and evaporate a lot of water, the basin was declared as the appropriate and ‘natural’ scale for organizing the river. As early as 1894, Willcocks – who would later be in charge of designing the Aswan dam – reported that upstream dams were required because storage in Egypt would be insufficient (Willcocks 1894). A British journalist in Egypt framed it as follows in 1904:

“all Nileland is one country. No divided sovereignty is possible; there must be one firm hand over all… Looking back, it is easy to see how it all followed in logical sequence. Everything depended on the Nile. The more Egypt was developed, the greater grew the need for the regulation of the Water. The rulers of Egypt need have troubled little about the fate of countries divided from them by so many leagues of rainless desert, but for the link of the all-important river” (Peel 1904 p134-135).

This was not just mere scalar imagination or paper engineering logic. The idea of the basin being the optimal scale for what Willcocks called “securing an abundant supply of water all the year round“ (Willcocks 1904, p73) took hold in the conquest of the Sudan and the construction of annual storage dams. Convinced by the profits and calculations of the modern economy and hydrology, investors who saw European markets faltering again in the first decade of the 20th century diverted increasing amounts of capital to the Nile. The 1902 Aswan dam, the first dam on the main stem of the Nile, increased the average ‘summer supply’ by 50% and thereby enabled an increase of perennial irrigation by 210,000 hectares (Willcocks 1904, p75-76). Through the reservoir, Egypt’s position as Britain’s main supplier of long staple cotton was secured. The dam provided engineers and investors with the ‘objective’ evidence for the success of modern hydraulic development. The British journalist Peel wrote:

“Well might Lord Cromer and the irrigation engineers review their work with satisfaction. To them, the [Aswan] Reservoir means the successful culmination of a great policy long and steadily pursued, nothing less than the establishment of the prosperity of Egypt upon a sure and certain basis: for this is what the regulation of the Nile involves. In Egypt, at any rate, they require no formal monument. Their praise stands clearly writ on the face of every cultivated field throughout the country” (Peel 1904, p100).

To protect its interests in the region (notably in capital invested in cotton production and the Suez Canal), it decided to retain control over Sudan and with it the water supply to Egypt. The expansion of the gigantic Gezira scheme in Sudan – originally planned to draw only non-summer water – was now seen in Egypt as a direct threat to Egyptian water supply. Following growing outrage over irrigation development in Sudan, the Egyptian and Sudanese governments installed a Nile Commission to relief tensions in 1925. In an exchange of notes which came to be known as the 1929 Nile waters Agreement, the UK and Egypt agreed that Sudan was allowed to abstract water from the Sennar reservoir, but only if it would not compromise Egypt’s summer water supply. While basin control of summer water for
Egypt was thus secured on paper and embedded in the annual storage dams built on the Nile at Aswan, Sennar, and later Gebel Aulia, the material reality of dam development of the 1930s marked the beginning of a shift towards a different model for organizing the river. No longer wanting to rely on Sudan for storage of Nile water, the Egyptian parliament decided to heighten the [original] Aswan dam and double its capacity before agreeing to the next upstream reservoir at Gebel Aulia in Sudan (see Figure 2.3). Holistic river basin planning had thus been dented. The next wave of dam construction on the Nile would take the form of national development.