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Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure
Author(s): Stefan Dorondel (Editor), Luminita Gatejel
- Publisher: Purdue University Press
- Publication Date: August 15, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 338 pages
- ISBN-10: 162671116X
- ISBN-13: 9781626711167
Book Description
Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts to control the Danube, the material systems they implemented to achieve these goals, and the agency of the river that both enabled the functioning of infrastructure and the breakdown of such arrangements. It draws particular attention to the concerted efforts to contain and optimize the Danube’s flow, adding layer after layer of dams, channels, and pipes that could potentially escalate the power of a leashed river. Taking a longer historical perspective from the sixteenth century until today, the volume provides a variety of relevant case studies and local contexts in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and their successor states Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia which show different ways of how humans have imagined and coped with this mighty river.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Like when you throw a stone in water, this book brings energy and creative disturbance to our understanding of Europe’s most international river. The essays look at the relationship between humans and water, technology and politics, from Ottoman times to the present. Each of the essays provides readers, like a curving river, with unexpected sights and with waves of insight from different disciplinary perspectives. A curious collection, and, indeed, one of the best scholarly books on the Danube in a long time!” —Christof Mauch, director, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
“This book makes me want to get on a boat and float down the ‘Blue Danube’ from headwaters to the Black Sea. Through history it has changed dramatically—and not always for the better. Many nations, capitalist or socialist, have tried to turn the river into infrastructure and make their civilization more prosperous and secure. This book is full of wonderful stories about that process and the people who sought to tame the river for some higher good. Highly recommended both for wild river lovers and state river managers everywhere.” —
Donald Worster, author of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West“
Flowing Progress offers a unique look into the history of the Danube River as a complex space of environmental interactions throughout the ages. Editors Stefan Dorondel and Luminita Gatejel assemble diverse case studies to examine how infrastructures are built, disrupted, and reshaped over time, challenging conventional boundaries in Danube scholarship. Grounded in historical analysis, the volume bridges disciplines across and beyond the humanities, uncovering the interplay of natural environments, human-made systems, and state power. With its transnational focus, this collection provides fresh perspectives on the evolving relationships that define the riverine landscape, making it an invaluable resource for those interested in history, ecology, and governance.” —Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, author of Sea Level: A History“The investigations of
Flowing Progress into the dynamics of ‘infrastructuring’ deepen classical themes of this historiography and contribute in an original way to its development by placing the concept of ‘disturbance’ at the center of their narratives of the relationship of modern communities with the Danube. In the end, the book invites one to go beyond boundaries between nature and technology by looking at ‘circular and spiraling dynamics’ between hydrological, socio-political, and technical processes.” —Austrian History Yearbook“
Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube through Infrastructure, edited by Stefan Dorondel and Luminita Gatejel, represents a timely and indispensable contribution. The volume stands as an essential resource for students of river history and for scholars engaging with the rich and multifaceted past of the Danube basin.” —Hungarian Historical ReviewAbout the Author
Stefan Dorondel is an anthropologist and environmental historian working for the Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology Bucharest and the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy. He is the author or coauthor of three books, and most recently coedited A New Ecological Order: Development and the Transformation of Nature in Eastern Europe. His research interests include rivers and wetlands, infrastructure, rewilding, and ecological restoration.
Luminita Gatejel is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. She received her PhD from the University of Tübingen and was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She has published extensively on the history of automobility, everyday life, and consumption in the Eastern Bloc. Her latest book is
Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland.
