Concrete Revolution

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Historians and other observers have demarcated the twentieth century according to a wide variety of cogent social and biophysical features. Some of the most popular candidates for “century- defining” trends include urbanization, rapid population growth, agricultural production, and more ominously, its characterization as the “most murderous century of which we have record.”1 Yet the twentieth century also witnessed a radical transformation of the planet’s river systems through the construction of an estimated 50,000 large dams, a hydrological and ecological experiment that has fundamentally altered human relations with water. One of the central ambitions of this book is to uncover the specific ways in which large- dam technologies and the ideologies that guided them have proliferated across the planet in the twentieth century. These ideologies and technologies are deeply intertwined and serve a central role in explaining how this “concrete revolution” materialized in the relatively short span of seven decades. My particular focus falls on the activities of the United States government to promote and shape the dissemination of, first, a crucial technological innovation in the form of large- scale hydroelectric dams and, second, a novel approach to resource use in the form of river basin planning and development. Throughout the Cold War era, these activities were largely carried out under the auspices of the United States’ preeminent water resource development agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, and were in many cases directed by the geopolitical imperatives of the State Department, who saw technical assistance as a crucial tool in staving off the presumed global expansion
of communism. Technical acumen and geopolitical imagination came together in a methodical process of damming the planet. Large dams are perhaps the quintessential example of what scholars across a range of disciplines call nature- society hybrids. These massive struc- tures, whether formed of concrete, or earth and rock, or more likely some combination, reside at the intersection of complex networks of altered hydrologies, technical expertise, financial circuits, political desires, displaced communities, and hegemonic ideologies. Dams, particularly since the 1970s, have also been the focal point of intense social conflict. The publication of Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision- Making, a seminal 2000 report by the World Commission on Dams (WCD), was the culmination of over three decades of debate on the benefits and costs of large dams. In brief, the report concludes that although dams “have made an important and significant contribution to human development,” they have too often produced severe social and environmental impacts borne disproportionately “by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment.”4 Predictably, the report was greeted with contradictory responses upon its release. Representatives of the global dambuilding industry and government representatives of countries with active
dam- building programs, such as China and India, condemned the report as disingenuous, lacking in rigor, and irrevocably biased against large dams. In
contrast, the global anti- dam movement fully endorsed the WCD report and its guidelines and called for immediate action on the part of governments
and international financial institutions to implement its recommendations regarding more participatory and transparent governance of water resource
development. Despite the scads of information in the report regarding the world’s dams and the varied reactions to its conclusions, both data and responses
were remarkably ahistorical, shedding little light on the practices and negotiations that over the course of the twentieth century brought forth
so many thousands of large dams. Remarkably, perhaps trying to appear balanced as an international body seeking common ground within a highly
charged debate, the WCD made little mention of the political character of large- dam projects.6 The study proposed here argues, conversely, that the
construction of large dams and the ideas set forth under the rubric of river basin planning, as well as the socioecological transformations wrought by
these activities, are inseparable from the political dynamics among the social actors who mobilized and sustained these technologies and ideas in the first
place. Dams are, as a matter of course, exceptionally “thick” with politics. It was the geopolitical thickness of large dams and associated river basin
development schemes that promulgated a concrete revolution in the twentieth century and hence prompted the title of this book. Although this phrase
is designed to mirror the other “revolutionary” developments of the same period— the Green Revolution being the obvious referent— I do not use it glibly

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