Infrastructure as archive

Examining the colonial geographies of rivers

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8963993
AutoresAlbert Read (0009-0005-3508-9732, School of Geography and the Environment University of Oxford Oxford UK, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen50
Número4
Fecha de publicación2025-07-18
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.70020
OpenAlexW4412964633
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas45

Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn

Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Capitalism · Colonialism · Dichotomy · Dualism · Geography · Ingenuity · Neoclassical economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Technocracy · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure