Canal Dreams.
Towards a Critical History of Inland Waterways

Shipping canals are an important feature of inland waterway navigation since late medieval times. Some canals still serve as important transport routes, others see little if any commercial traffic and plenty of pleasure boats, and some are defunct and barely visible in the landscape. At the same time, the canals that were actually built are just a fraction of those that were imagined and planned at some point in time. There is a great number of canal projects, some highly ambitious, that were proposed, discussed, and even partially constructed but failed to produce a complete, usable waterway.

Canal dreams were about more than transportation needs. They were often part of overarching schemes that sought to transform economies, create modern societies, and engage in nation-building. In hydrological terms, building canals could be an element in comprehensive plans that aimed for river regulation, independence from navigation in the open sea, or the redesign of entire river systems. Recent scholarship has explored how canals were a form of geo-engineering avant la lettre.

The workshop seeks to assemble an interdisciplinary group of researchers who have worked on the imagination, construction and operation of artificial inland waterways. It has a particular interest in contributions that explore the tension between dreams and hopes and built realities. Emphatically global in scope, the workshop departs from the assumption that canals have transnational features that provide windows on the material and imagined scaffolding of global modernity. Speakers may come from a variety of academic backgrounds including universities, research institutes, archives, and museums.

The concept of ‘Canal Dreams’ is open to a broad range of perspectives and approaches. Potential topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Proposals and rationales for unrealised canal projects
• Economic ideas and concepts behind canal projects
• Political aims in the context of canal proposals and construction 
• Canals and nation-building
• Canals and geo-engineering
• Interaction of canals and other means of transport
• The role of industry in the making of canal projects
• Perception of canal projects in contemporary media
• Canals as a tool of social engineering
• How would canal history look without the modern state? 
• Why do canals remain open when they lack an economic purpose?