Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and Territoriality in an Imperial Borderland, Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The Lower Danube—the stretch of Europe’s second longest river between the Romanian-Serbian border and the confluence to the Black Sea—was effectively transformed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In describing this lengthy undertaking, Luminita Gatejel proposes that remaking two key stretches—the Iron Gates and the delta—not only physically altered the river but also redefined it in a legal and political sense.

Since the late eighteenth century, military conflicts and pe...