Searching for Water beyond Modern Infrastructures in the 19th and 20th Centuries

• Applicant: Dr. Robert Pursche
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 554246738

Control over water resources was a central element of imperial expansionist endeavors. Environmental history concerned with modern imperialism since the end of the 19th century has thus primarily focused on the construction of modern infrastructures as “patterns of modernity” (Dirk van Laak). My project examines a specific problem that has been overlooked so far: How did people search for water where there were neither open natural water resources nor existing infrastructure? What happened in the very moment before the imperial frontier moved forward; and how do we account for the interstices of the ‘patterns of modernity’? By placing competing forms of knowledge and practices of searching for water at the center of my investigation, I gain new insights into the history of modern imperialism from the perspective of the history of knowledge and environmental history. The uncertain and rather tentative phases of the imperial land grab become just as visible as the practical limits of the ideology of human domination of nature. I am going to focus on the search for water in south-west Africa, east Africa and North America in the period from around 1880 to around 1960. These regions are linked to the history of three (very different) empires: the British Empire, the German Empire and the USA. The period under investigation allows me to explore various historical constellations: colonial cooperation between the empires, the era of the world wars and the period of decolonization. In terms of methodology, my project analysis the search for water from a transimperial perspective. In doing so, I will expand research that has so far predominantly focused on national perspectives in imperial history. All three empires had to deal with water scarcity in their expansionist endeavors. On the one hand, I am thus going to carve out the differences and similarities in the forms of knowledge and techniques of searching for water. On the other hand, I analyze personal and institutional entanglements and (limits of) the dissemination of knowledge across imperial borders. I am going to attend to three practices that bring into focus different forms of knowledge: first, the development of modern hydrogeology, secondly, dowsing, and thirdly, the local knowledge traditions of colonized actors such as the Herero and Nama in southwest Africa. By placing these approaches within the joint horizon of the search for water, I can analyze how the boundaries between 'modern' science and 'backward' superstition were renegotiated in the imperial peripheries: First, in the classical sense of the 'civilizing mission' between colonialists and colonized, but above all also within the empires and between the empires themselves, namely on the basis of, for example, the conflict between divining and hydrogeology.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position