From Nature to National Networks: Hydraulic Bureaucracy and the Modernization of Waters in Czechia, 1890s–1960s
2022
Abstrakt
This chapter focuses on the fate of the national technocratic modernist project of the Czech hydraulic mission during the twentieth century from the perspective of its key actors-members of the state water management bureaucracy, which scholars have dubbed the hydrocracy. The concept of hydrocracy was elaborated by the development studies specialists François Molle and Peter P.
Mollinga as a modern response to Karl August Wittfogel's classic theory about the emergence of hydraulic civilizations in ancient Oriental empires.