In 1996, along the Yangtze River in Zigui 秭归, Hubei Province, the villagers of Guilin were in the middle of packing their belongings. Their friends and relatives were helping them to remove tiles, doors, and windows from the soon to be deluged homes. Down the hill, people were loading farm tools, furniture, and other essentials onto boats anchored along the river’s banks. Amid the din of firecrackers and farewells from their fellow villagers, the first group of Three Gorges migrants set off for their government-designated places of resettlement. Because of the low-altitude location of their residence, Zhang Bing’ai 张秉爱, together with her disabled husband, and two children, were supposed to be part of the first group of migrants. For years, thanks to the help of her maternal family, Bing’ai had been able to cope with the burdensome farm work during busy seasons. Therefore, she insisted on staying for “moving up” resettlement, requesting a flat area for residential use at a higher altitude above the state designated displacement line, which was at odds with the government’s resettlement policy. “I am just attached to this land. With land, you can have everything.” Bing’ai refused to cooperate with the government’s resettlement plan, but it was to no avail. Her home, along with what remained of those of her fellow villagers, was soon underwater. Her family ended up living in a temporary hut not far from the rising water.

Chapter 4 delves into the “great leap” of small hydropower during the Maoist period. It analyzes the distinctive feature of the expansion of the hydropower nation as it was influenced by Maoist ideology: Mass participation. Despite the common assumption that Communist China blindly pursued mega dams, Mao believed in “walking on two legs”: Large Soviet-style dams on the one hand, and small indigenous hydro projects that could be built and operated by the masses on the other. With the goal of boosting agricultural productivity and rural electrification, the PRC state mobilized communes nationwide to harness local rivers for the generation of electricity. This chapter examines local experiences of small hydro campaigns, focusing on Yongchun in Fujian Province. Across the country, tens of thousands of small hydroelectric power stations were constructed within a few years. The lack of prior hydrological investigations and professional knowledge, however, meant that many of these stations were not able to deliver stable electrical output, while they also resulted in the fragmentation of local rivers.

Chapter 1 investigates the introduction of knowledge about the conversion of river flows into electricity to China in the late Qing and early Republican periods. Despite the prominence of fossil fuel energy in the industrialized world, certain Chinese intellectuals advocated harnessing the country’s abundant river resources to produce electricity as a means of achieving full national independence. Local elites took the lead in constructing the first set of hydropower stations in southwest China, and afterwards an increasing number of Chinese elites recognized the potential of hydropower in the country. As a result, in the context of a long-term national crisis, hydropower came to be, for many people, synonymous with the strengthening of the Chinese nation.

Megaliths, burial mounds, and other remnants of ancient human civilization littered the region. No textual sources about them survived. Competing with ancient Greece and Rome, local scholars composed rival visions of antiquity that supported Swedish, Danish, or German imperial ambitions. By contrast, Major developed a distinctive approach to prehistory that served no political interests. Assuming a prehistoric state of human desperation, Major reasoned about prehistory by using the intellectual approaches of the history of learning and experimental philosophy. He developed a multiyear research project that deployed extensive excavations, purposeful travel, distinctive visual techniques, and novel note-taking methods. He identified so-called thunderstones as ancient artifacts as well as the varying deployment of stone, bronze, and iron in different time periods through the use of stratigraphy and the ordering of finds by the materials used. In 1688, he opened a public museum and conference hall where members of opposing sides in the war could discuss the history of their shared region. Although this institution did not long survive Major’s death, his archaeological approach did.

This chapter examines the history of Marie-Yvonne Vellard, an Aché girl from Paraguay who was captured in the 1930s at the age of two and raised by a French scientist named Jehan Albert Vellard. By examining the various retellings of Marie-Yvonne’s story and the many stories of captured children that populate ethnographic studies of the Aché, this essay tracks how colonial violence against Indigenous peoples was repackaged within a ostensibly antiracist framework. While the redemptive accounts of her story did important work by challenging biological determinism, they also concealed how the practices of mid-century human scientists sometimes encouraged the forced removal of children from their families and the dispossession of Indigenous territory. In fact, as this chapter demonstrates, until the 1960s ethnographic studies of the Aché were based primarily on captured children and attest to an established practice and economy of buying and trading Aché children as servants. Although researchers who studied captured Aché children positioned themselves as civilized men of science, they did not condemn the trafficking of Aché children that they benefitted from and instead presented it as a fait accompli that they could only observe as modest witnesses.

Chapter 6 focusses on the different forms of cross-ideological alliances between Islamist and leftist movements that were made to oppose the authoritarian regime. Far from romanticising those experiences into the clichéd concept of good opponents all coming together to fight the authoritarian regime, the chapter demonstrates instead how building cross-ideological alliances provoked ruptures and crystallised dissension within the constellations of actors themselves. It also shows how specific organisations and actors, mobilised on several scenes, came to play different roles in those alliances. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how each constellation of actors also maintained its own spaces of sociability and its own networks. Long-distance activism entailed other forms of activities that were turned towards group members in order to maintain activist groups despite their members’ new political lives in exile. Both Islamists and leftists worked to preserve their communities and to ensure the continuity of activism, albeit in different ways.

Chapter 4 explores the nature of anti-Ben Ali politics from afar. It focusses on the field of homeland politics by investigating the modalities, frames and repertoires of action used by activists who fought the authoritarian regime. The chapter highlights the ambivalent logic underlying the use of human rights, which became the main frame of contention for the various actors. For pro-regime actors, the human rights frame was paradoxically a way of legitimising the regime abroad; for Islamists, the activation of a discourse on human rights appeared as a way of circumventing the distrust to which they were habitually subjected in France; and for leftists, human rights stood as a rallying point, because fighting the Ben Ali regime during this period meant embracing the Islamists as a matter of necessity, as they were main victims of repression. The chapter goes on to investigate two further lines of cleavage that are crucial to the full understanding of long-distance Tunisian opposition politics. These lines offer a framework that determined means of action in terms of relationships with the Islamists and the degree of rupture with the Tunisian authoritarian regime.

This chapter looks at the history of three institutions operated by the Territory of Hawaiʻi: the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys (opened in 1902), the Kawailoa Training School for Girls (opened in 1929), and the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded (opened in 1921). The combined rhetorics of correction and care for Hawaiʻi’s children at play in these carceral institutions echoed the broader, paternalistic justifications for annexing Hawaiʻi as saving the islands both from other colonial empires and a Hawaiian Kingdom that white settlers characterized as uncivilized and childish. The Territorial government repeatedly used the scientific imprimatur of work by those like psychologist Stanley Porteus as well as models of training schools and homes for the “feebleminded” in the continental United States as justifications for institutionalizing Native Hawaiians and immigrants of color. This chapter focuses on two main themes. The first tracks the settler colonial process of pathologizing Native Hawaiian and other non-white forms of kinship and care, and attempts to replace it with institutionalized care. The second theme examines how a critical history of these institutions offers a different picture of the Territorial period in Hawaiʻi.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

This concluding chapter looks back at the main findings that emerged from this research and shows how they explain the transformation of long-distance Tunisian politics in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. It asks how the anti- and pro-regime struggles evolved following the demise of the central purpose of these struggles and the movements they inspired, and looks at the ways in which boundaries were redefined through different fields of action and the growth of new divisions. The emergence of new actors, the political reconversion of those who had shifted to Tunisian-centred politics, new rules of the game and the various possibilities of return to Tunisia each played a role in redefining the modalities of long-distance Tunisian politics. However, decades of activism had regulated the practice of activists from afar and reinforced the informal rules of the trans-state space of mobilisation. The 2011 Revolution simultaneously represented a decisive rupture and a continuity, reshaping and continuing to reshape the dynamics of the trans-state space of mobilisation.

Chapter 5 describes the planning, design, and construction of the Sanmenxia Hydropower Project in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Building on David Pietz’s analysis of the Soviet influence on the general plan for the Yellow River, this chapter examines the negotiations that took place between Soviet experts, their Chinese counterparts, and local stakeholders during the process of designing the Sanmenxia Dam. While the Communist Party proclaimed in 1957 that the primary purpose of the project was flood control, it is clear from the sources examined in this chapter that the generation of hydroelectricity was the principal element of the dam’s design.