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The Nile River has featured prominently in both nationalist memoirs and foreigners' travelogues. This paper explores human interventions in the Nile, not in the physical changes in the landscape but rather in the imagination, discourses and knowledge production of the nineteenth century European and Ottoman Empires. We show how the emergence of the 'modern river' was made possible by two crucial strains of Nile imaginaries and knowledge. The paper examines writings by European travellers and nationalist writing by Egypt's modernist, Alī Mubārak. Through our analysis we show how the Nile was co-constituted by two principal story-telling ventures: European travelogues and Egyptian modernist writing.

This article analyses the recent contestation over the Nile River due to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and its implications for the agrarian question and water justice. The article focuses on the commodification of the Nile by national governments, whereby technology, rationality, and regulations have become the driving force of the river’s development. The engagement of civil society actors in the GERD dispute reveals several perceptions of “riverhood” of the Nile. As a result, water justice is heterogeneous and challenges building a wide-basin movement.