WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Today, hydropower is promoted as a greener alternative to fossil fuel power. While historians have developed vigorous discussions about coal and oil, such as “carbon democracy” and “carbon technocracy,” hydropower has received little theoretical attention, despite its significance. Many countries have heavily relied on hydropower for their industrialization since the late 19th century, and dam construction was and still is a popular big-ticket development aid project after 1945. This panel aims to develop an analytical framework to examine hydropower and the politics of water management under the theme of hydro developmentalism in the Japanese empire.

We tackle the following questions: What social, geopolitical, and environmental conditions enable hydro developmentalism, and what new power dynamics does hydro developmentalism generate? How did these dynamics develop differently between colonial, postcolonial, and socialist nation-building contexts? How might hydro developmentalism differ from coal/petro developmentalism? How have diverse historical actors understood the linkages between hydropower, development, and their ecological ramifications? Four panelists present our current research to engage with these questions: Wilson on conflicts between hydro developers and affected local residents in early twentieth-century Japan, Mizuno on the Japanese empire’s “carbon technocracy” and “hydro technocracy” in colonial Korea and Manchuria/northeast China, Yamane on wartime dam construction and its direct influence postwar land development policies and projects and Dinmore on a Japanese-Indonesian large dam and aluminum smelting project in Suharto-era Sumatra.