Abstract:

Is engineering as an approach for understanding and acting upon the world different from the discipline of history?  And if so, how does one discuss and identify the conceptual boundaries and overlaps between engineering and the writing of history. In a little-remembered publication of 1919, C.A. Williams, then superintendent engineer (Public Works Department, Bengal), titled his booklet under the heading History of the Rivers in the Gangetic Delta (1750-1918). In it, he cautioned his readers that the effort was not an exercise in documentation but rather to 'forecast what is likely to happen in the future' and inform 'future policy'.  History, for Williams, was thus a tool to predict and shape the future. Environmental historians of South Asia, on the other hand, are concerned with discussing rivers as problems of recovering their pasts. My presentation will explore how ideas about modern river-control in nineteenth and twentieth century British India help us explore the conceptual tensions between engineering world views and the historian's craft.