Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland by Luminita Gatejel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland by Luminita Gatejel
• Stelu Şerban (bio)

Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland By Luminita Gatejel. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022. Pp. 341.

The history of river infrastructure is a space of confluence of several research fields, such as the history of international relations, environmental history, and science and technology studies (STS). Luminita Gatejel's book discusses the Lower Danube, from the Iron Gates to the mouth of the Black Sea, between 1770 and the end of the nineteenth century, combining these different approaches.

From the perspective of geopolitical relations, the author brings to the fore the "hydroimperialism" (Sara Pritchard, From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism, 2012) of the empires then influential in this part of the Danube: the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Tsarist Empire. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Tsarist Empire in the war concluded in 1774 resulted in the liberalization of trade on the Black Sea, so that after 1780 the Lower Danube was seen by Habsburg and Russian rulers as the main trade route between the Black Sea and Central Europe. However, the existence of natural obstacles, the most formidable being the Iron Gates and the Danube Delta, slowed down the use of this route.

In the five chapters of the volume, the author addresses how access through these two great natural obstacles was improved throughout the nineteenth century. A series of geopolitical contexts and groups of bureaucrats, technocrats, and entrepreneurs, as well as crucial institutions such as the European Danube Commission (EDC), are analyzed. Gatejel emphasizes that the completion of these infrastructural projects took a long time because the actors involved in the project were confronted with a number of problems, which in addition to the natural barriers included political conflicts, which forced them to adjust their initial plans. The divergences between the states involved in the two projects, the alternative opinions of technocrats on different solutions, and also the influence of economic factors that led to the transformation of the Lower Danube into a cost-effective transport option are presented.

Gatejel discusses first the case of the Iron Gates. The engineers of the Habsburg government, charged at the end of the eighteenth century with describing this area, signaled the dangers to navigation and proposed solutions for regulation. It was only in the mid-1830s, however, in the context of the liberalization of trade on the Danube following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, that the first large-scale project developed. The project was led by István Széchenyi, civilian commissioner of the Danube, and hydraulic engineer Pál Vásárhelyi and funded by the recently established Austrian Danube Steamboat Shipping Company. The other project, the navigability of the [End Page 394] Danube Delta, took shape after 1830. Experts from the Austrian government, as well as engineers sent by the British government, proposed alternative projects to ease the connection between the Danube and the Black Sea. Three main arms of the Danube Delta were proposed, as well as building a route between Cernavodă and Constanța, which would shortcut the delta. The latter was to be either a railway or a canal. Only after 1856, however—following another Russo-Turkish war, which ended indecisively—was the EDC established, under the umbrella of which the efficiency of the delta projects was considered. Following the model of the Rhine Commission, the EDC was based on the principles of international navigation law and was formed by the Habsburg, Tsarist, and Ottoman empires, as well as France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Sardinia, all states with interests in the Danube Delta. Gatejel shows that the pragmatism of the EDC, under the coordination of engineer Charles Hartley, resulted in regulating the entire Sulina arm, while the Iron Gates project was plagued by the competition between Austria and Hungary.

Luminita Gatejel's book is remarkable for the richness of details through which the different stages of the two major projects on the Lower Danube are presented. Many of these are novel and useful for scholars in the field. But there are also glaring errors, for example in...