Subaltern insurgency against colonial waterworks continues two centuries later as levees are broken

Evidence

It is from his report, a text from the other side, that we realize that the best thing that the British could do was to restore these completely destroyed ancient waterworks, because the affluence of the place had been destroyed, since the place had been left open to incredible floods. Now let me tell you that in that same area today, landless peasants and fisherfolk are breaking the enormous levees constructed by the World Bank. Two hundred years of continuity, always failing: subaltern insurgency. So that to an extent, and in fact, what the ecological workers now suggest is that those ancient waterworks destroyed two hundred years ago be restored, but, and I am paraphrasing Fred Pierce, they cannot be rebuilt because the way that they had been built was slowly, respecting the rhythm of those very young rivers, whereas the way things would be built today would be capital-intensive, cost-efficient, and fast. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2302

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ruined infrastructure that cannot be rebuilt because it was built ‘slowly, respecting the rhythm of rivers’ extends the reader’s tree-as-infrastructure piece about vernacular building methods that capital-intensive modern methods cannot replicate.
• XREF: connects to: Colonialist attacks on a custom create the native resistance that sustains it

Broader Connections

• Colonialist attacks on a custom create the native resistance that sustains it #exemplifies (0.85)