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The building of the Aswan High Dam offers a rich case study that elucidates how post-colonial nation-building projects and economic development regimes have employed twentieth-century ideas and practices in resource and economic management in the post-war period. The High Dam project was part of a wider effort, led by the Free Officers' regime, to undertake an ambitious social and economic transformation, guided by principles of economic independence and social welfare, and that was to be achieved through technocratic state planning. In the 1950s, Nasser's government began to establish a statist economic development regime based on centralized planning and the expansion of the public sector. These efforts were not exceptional, but part of a broader phenomenon during the post-war period when national planning was a paramount political priority for many newly independent nation-states. Influenced by the diffusion of an eclectic mix of Keynesianism, Soviet-style communism, and development economics since the 1930s, many countries, after gaining independence, established state planning committees, industrialization schemes, capital-intensive public infrastructure projects, and forms of market control. These policies relied on new forms of knowledge and practice both in engineering-hydroelectricity, dam building, and new agricultural technologies-and in economics-national statistics, market regulation, theories of growth and capital accumulation, and technical assistance.
While many studies of the High Dam have emphasized its expression of state-guided development and the centralization of state power, few have looked beyond the Nasserist state to understand the origins of the plan and the early phases of its conception. Recent studies of Egypt in the inter-war and post-war periods have begun to excavate the links between Nasserist etatism and earlier forms of knowledge, institutions, and state regulation that predated the 1952 revolution and were transmitted through global movements of expertise. In sketching these connections, which were heavily conditioned by the experiences of war, colonialism, and economic crisis, scholars are beginning to show that Nasser's statist economic and social policies were not just a consequence of post-colonial economic nationalism. Nor did they mark a clean break with earlier forms of economic and social regulation. Rather, the regulatory character of the new regime, and its concern with state-led economic development and the provision of social welfare, grew out of preexisting knowledges, institutions, and practices in domains as varied as social sciences, economic...