The recent collective volume edited by Frederik Schulze and Vincent Lagendijk is a welcome contribution not only to academic scholarship but also to the ongoing debate on the viability of dams as tools for sustainable global development.
The volume’s primary objective is to offer a fresh analytical lens for studying dam-building, moving beyond superpowers and Cold War rivalries. Instead, the editors frame dam-building as a global endeavour where non-aligned and peripheral actors played a pivotal role. The central argument posits that dam projects “enabled new, formerly marginalized actors, especially from the Global South […] to challenge global power relations and pursue their socio-economic goals” (p. 9). In this view, peripheral states and actors used dam-building to create alternative geographies and international networks, challenging the traditional capitalist-socialist dichotomy.
The volume comprises eleven chapters adopting diverse perspectives and scales. Many focus on specific national case studies, investigating either the transnational mobility of a country’s experts or the global connections involved in a particular dam construction. Others employ supranational perspectives, such as Schulze’s chapter on Latin America or Lagendijk’s analysis of international organizations.
Highlighting states and actors often neglected in mainstream historiography on technology and infrastructure is one of the volume’s major strengths. The simultaneous exploration of contexts like India (Ramya Swayamprakash), China (Xiangli Ding), Uzbekistan (Flora Roberts), Spain (Benjamin Brendel), Czechoslovakia (Jirí Janáč and Jakub Mazanec), Ethiopia (Sara de Simone), Ghana (Stephan Miescher), and Mexico (Diana Schwartz Francisco) underscores that these nations were more than mere recipients of Soviet or American agendas or passive allies of one of the two superpowers. Moreover, the book effectively reveals the transnational entanglements inherent in large infrastructure projects, an often-overlooked dimension.
However, as is common in edited volumes with broad themes and ambitious arguments, the book occasionally lacks coherence. The editors argue that “internationalism”—defined as the “intention of expanding socio-political, economic, and cultural cooperation between nations” (p. 10)—is the most appropriate analytical category for studying global dam-building. They coin the expression “daminternationalism” to encompass “all sorts of international entanglements and exchanges that were and are both a condition and an outcome of dam-building” (p. 11).
This broad application raises the question: should any transnational connection qualify as internationalism? A review of key scholarly contributions on internationalism reveals a common feature: it typically involves state and non-state actors bound by shared goals or visions, creating platforms that transcend national boundaries. In this case, internationalism may not be the best lens for the examined case studies. It feels forced, indeed, to group under one analytical label phenomena with little in common.
In most instances, experts engaged in dam-building pursued purely national goals, using transnational networks as instrumental tools. For example, it is difficult to interpret Chinese engineers’ work in Albania or Haile Selassie’s use of U.S. aid as part of a coherent political or scientific project grounded in a shared vision. Even within the same chapter, the concept of internationalism is sometimes applied inconsistently. While cooperation among Soviet bloc engineers can reasonably be seen as socialist internationalism, the activities of Czechoslovak experts in the Global South primarily aimed to secure markets for their hydroelectric industry, without necessarily reflecting a unified vision of international relations. Instances of deeper, truly internationalist projects, such as the influence of Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-colonial ideas on Indian engineers (p. 27), are only briefly mentioned.
The category of internationalism seems more fitting in chapters that examine how dam-building facilitated the emergence of an epistemic community of experts within international institutions. Examples include Schulze’s analysis of Latin America’s evolution from an aid recipient to an infrastructural knowledge hub, participating in transnational bodies like the “International Commission on Large Dams” (ICOLD). Similarly, Lagendijk explores how international organizations shaped a standard approach to dam-building as a developmental tool before the 1960s and an anti-dam perspective based on environmentalism and human rights afterward. Schwartz Francisco also highlights the role of decolonial and environmentalist internationalism in shaping Mexican anthropologists’ shifting views on dam-building and developmentalism.
Ultimately, the volume leaves readers with an unresolved question posed also by Corinna Unger in the epilogue: “Would the volume be better described as an international history of dams than as the history of dam internationalism?” (p. 237). In other words, would it have been more appropriate to apply different analytical frameworks and perhaps retitle the book (e.g., “A Global History of Dam-Building in the Twentieth Century”)? The broad use of internationalism represents the book’s greatest weakness.
Nonetheless, the volume’s merits remain significant. It will undoubtedly become essential reading for students and researchers interested in the complex global dynamics of infrastructure-building in the twentieth century.
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