Neuzeitkolloquium The Plumbing of Empire: Sanitary Systems, Adaptation, and Opposition in Global Perspective

In his talk, Corey Ross examines the transformation of colonial cities in the late 19th and early 20th  centuries through efforts to channel their flows of water. He shows how the social, environmental, and cultural landscape of cities shaped the creation of new water and  sewerage systems, and highlights the processes of negotiation,  appropriation, and exclusion that were involved. Thereby, he argues that the hydraulic re-ordering of colonial cities ultimately rested on a profound mismatch between the globalization of normative  expectations about water provisioning on the one hand, and the limited  transfer of technical infrastructures on the other.