ABSTRACT
In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama discusses “rivers … as lines of power” (260-261). Such natural advantages lend authority and influence to the government that can harness the inherent power of these resources and thus display its ability to control nature. This kind of dominance emerges even more clearly from canal-building, itself an exercise in power and a method of control. Political systems build canals to demonstrate their capacity to achieve various goals, including most importantly the wielding and display of power broadly defined. To manage a large-scale construction project, the state must mobilize its fiscal resources, reveal its capacity for intelligent engineering and planning, and supply considerable physical labor, usually coupled with expensive heavy equipment. Earth must be moved, water channeled, physical barriers removed, and people displaced. The state that manages such a project wins an ideological victory by demonstrating its capacity to overcome any obstacle thanks largely to its ideology.2 The physical structures – the locks, dams, dikes, reservoirs, pumping stations, and control towers – that adorn waterways exude power through the fact of their existence.
