Joint Center for History and Economics Online Seminar

Arunabh Ghosh - The Significance of Small Things: Towards a History of Dam Building in the Twentieth Century

By the turn of the twenty-first century China was home to forty percent (one in three) of the world’s large dams. Striking as that infrastructural and environmental feat is, it tends to elide an equally remarkable investment in building small hydro power during the same period. By 1981, there were well over 80,000 small hydropower dams in the country. In this talk, I explore this latter history, situating it within the political economy and environmental history of the People’s Republic of China.

Arunabh Ghosh is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China.