ABSTRACT
Historians have traced roots of Enlightenment environmentalism to the encounter with supposedly conservationist approaches to nature in Asia; this chapter excavates the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge about canals during the eighteenth century in order to explore a competing vision in which nature was to be remade for human ends. Built in Europe and throughout the Indo-Pacific world, canals are constructed natural things whose purpose is to manage, control, and direct other natural things. Canals put both natural things and knowledge about them in motion. The French traveler Pierre Poivre admired the irrigation techniques that watered the Mekong Delta, while the statesman Henri Bertin took China’s Grand Canal as a model for French transportation engineering. Their advocacy of an intervention-ist approach to the natural environment resulted from encounters with Asian contemporaries, including the Sino-Vietnamese prince Mạc Thiên Tứ and the Chinese priest Aloys Kô, as well as efforts to understand their natural knowledge. The Enlightenment discovered not only natural utopias in Asia, but also others that were man-made.
