Mitchell 1948
Economentality: How the Future
Entered Government
Timothy Mitchell
In 1947, an Egyptian entrepreneur named Adriano Daninos published a proposal in a scientific journal in Cairo to build a new dam across the Nile.
Placed upstream of a smaller masonry barrage built fifty years earlier by the British at Aswan, the new rock-filled structure would be so large that the reservoir it created would stretch more than five hundred kilometers to the south. “Daninos is a man with a mission,” reported an official at the World
Bank in Washington, where Daninos later went to pitch his plan. The official noted that the scheme concerned not just the building of the dam but
“land reclamation and irrigation connected therewith, production of power, and construction of plants to use that power in mining, making fertilizers, other manufacturing, and possibly iron and steel.”1 Before publishing his plan, Daninos had visited the Tennessee Valley Authority in the
US and similar integrated hydroelectric, river control, irrigation, and industrialization projects in the Limousin in southwest France. These gargantuan schemes for reorganizing forces of nature, systems of agriculture,
A draft of this paper was presented at the “After 1948: Realignments in Politics and Culture” conference, University of Chicago, 26–27 April 2012 and at the “Histories of Land, Economy, and Power” conference, Harvard University, 9–10 November, 2012. I am grateful to participants in both conferences for their comments on the paper and to Tim Shenk for detailed contributions to a subsequent draft. I am also grateful to Dalia Ghaith for research assistance.
1. Hector Prud’homme, memorandum, “Nile Project—visit of Mr. Daninos,” 27 Jan. 1953, documents relating to the Report on the Agricultural Aspects of the Sudd el Aali Project (High
Aswan Dam Project), WB 1589793, World Bank Group Archives, Washington, D. C. The memo spells Daninos’s first name as Adrien.
Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)
© 2014 by The University
Entered Government
Timothy Mitchell
In 1947, an Egyptian entrepreneur named Adriano Daninos published a proposal in a scientific journal in Cairo to build a new dam across the Nile.
Placed upstream of a smaller masonry barrage built fifty years earlier by the British at Aswan, the new rock-filled structure would be so large that the reservoir it created would stretch more than five hundred kilometers to the south. “Daninos is a man with a mission,” reported an official at the World
Bank in Washington, where Daninos later went to pitch his plan. The official noted that the scheme concerned not just the building of the dam but
“land reclamation and irrigation connected therewith, production of power, and construction of plants to use that power in mining, making fertilizers, other manufacturing, and possibly iron and steel.”1 Before publishing his plan, Daninos had visited the Tennessee Valley Authority in the
US and similar integrated hydroelectric, river control, irrigation, and industrialization projects in the Limousin in southwest France. These gargantuan schemes for reorganizing forces of nature, systems of agriculture,
A draft of this paper was presented at the “After 1948: Realignments in Politics and Culture” conference, University of Chicago, 26–27 April 2012 and at the “Histories of Land, Economy, and Power” conference, Harvard University, 9–10 November, 2012. I am grateful to participants in both conferences for their comments on the paper and to Tim Shenk for detailed contributions to a subsequent draft. I am also grateful to Dalia Ghaith for research assistance.
1. Hector Prud’homme, memorandum, “Nile Project—visit of Mr. Daninos,” 27 Jan. 1953, documents relating to the Report on the Agricultural Aspects of the Sudd el Aali Project (High
Aswan Dam Project), WB 1589793, World Bank Group Archives, Washington, D. C. The memo spells Daninos’s first name as Adrien.
Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)
© 2014 by The University
References: Schemes—High Aswan Dam—Sterling Releases,” 16 Sept. 1955, Public Record Office, BT, 213/ 44, 1955, National Archives of the UK, and International Bank for Reconstruction and Controlled Economy,” New York Times, 29 Jan. 1938, p. E4. Unpopular with academic economists, this kind of “misplaced definite8. See Gerhard Colm and Fritz Lehman, Economic Consequences of Recent American Tax Policy (New York, 1938). 9. Will Lissner, “New Deal Policies Blamed for Slump,” New York Times, 23 Jan. 1938, query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?resϭF30D12FC355A157A93C1AB178AD85F4C8385F9 Revenue, Statistics of Income for 1933 (Washington, D.C., 1935) and Statistics of Income for 1939: Part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1942), www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats-Archive. Colm on John Maurice Clark’s Economics of Planning Public Works: An Unpublished Letter,” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 29A (2011): 83–93. 12. Albert Gailord Hart, review of Economic Consequences of Recent American Tax Policy by Colm and Lehmann, Journal of Political Economy 47 (June 1939): 438, 439