As agricultural practices in Egypt changed under the British occupation, the new flooding cycle of the Nile River marked the lives of the rural farmers with more river borne diseases like hookworm, creating a new normal for lower-class Egyptians.

Associate Professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz Jennifer Derr presented her newest work, “The Lived Nile: Environment, disease and material economy in Egypt” on Wednesday—part of a brown bag lunch series hosted by the Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Derr’s talk focused on 20th century Egypt, specifically the Northern region—the first to adopt perennial irrigation, which floods growing fields multiple times a year—and the Southern region, which did not change its agricultural practices, letting the Nile’s natural flooding season dictate farming.

The practice of perennial irrigation allowed capitalists to profit from cash crops like sugarcane and cotton, Derr said, and divided Egyptian society into two main classes: large landowners and sharecroppers or laborers.

Fundamentally changing the nature of the Nile, Derr said, came with many consequences, including increased disease for Northern Nile populations. Schistosome parasites—worms carried in river snails that then infect humans—and hookworm became increasingly common, along with side effects including rashes that develop within days, muscle aches, chills, fever, anemia, malnutrition and inflammation or scarring of the liver or bladder when the worms travel throughout the body.

In the 1930s, the rate of infection in some rural communities was at 60 percent, sometimes even exceeding 90 percent, said Derr. Southern Egyptian communities had a rate of infection around five percent because they did not use agricultural practices that increased exposure to and survival of the parasites.

“The symptoms of these diseases helped to structure normative bodily experiences of colonial economies among rural populations—especially the laborers who built and practiced the river through the daily work of agriculture,” said Derr.

While these diseases were a problem spread by new agricultural practices, Derr said, Egyptian citizens viewed symptoms on an individual basis, not as a systemic issue.

For Derr, the environment is not a “thing apart” from the rest of Egypt’s history. Instead, the changes to the Nile present an example of a new form of violence perpetrated against the Egyptian people: violence in the form of disease.

But this form of violence was not the only focus of Derr’s book, nor the only form that existed, said Derr.

“While disease was one form of slow violence that was wrought on rural populations it was certainly not the only form,” she said. “The book also traces the violence that stemmed from the social relations of the political economy, the labor relations that prevailed in sugar cane fields and agricultural factories and somewhat ironically, the very programs designed to treat parasitic disease that were established in the 1920s.”

Some programs meant to treat parasitic diseases in rural populations were brutally enforced, said Derr. Egyptians were beaten unless they agreed to undergo a long, painful treatment—despite the fact that they were very likely to be reinfected upon returning to the agricultural fields, said Derr.

Derr also spoke about how controlling the flow of the Nile was a process best understood by Egyptian engineers, and the British engineers worked to understand the Nile in Egyptian terms—not the other way around.

“While British engineers were certainly important to the construction of a river in the period of Egypt’s colonial economy, they did not land in Egypt fully actualized as experts,” Derr said. “What they came to know and how they made a performance of their expertise was a direct result of their experiences in Egypt and their interactions with Egyptian cultivators, engineers and the landscape itself.”

Derr gave the example of a British engineer tasked with investigating irrigation problems in Egypt, who used Egyptian language and the Coptic calendar to describe proper irrigation practices. Egyptian engineers were also crucial for dam construction on the Nile, Derr said.

“The potential threat that Egyptian engineers posed to the presumption of British expertise was complicated by the nature of the British project during the first decade of the occupation,” Derr said. “In this period no new irrigation works were constructed. The British appointees were tasked with the repair and maintenance of existing works in Egypt.”

“Maintenance . . . inherently attribute[d] value to the work of other engineers—the daily work of maintenance served to unsettle the claims of superior knowledge so often espoused by British engineers,” she continued.

Derr concluded her talk by taking questions from the audience. One member asked about the net effect of changing the Nile on Egypt as a whole, and Derr clarified that agricultural growth is not always a good thing, and in this case, was not a net good. She also spoke about a book she is working on, which traces the history of the liver in Egypt.