How did different state and supra-state actors attempt to organize the natural environment of the Danube through infrastructural and technological projects? This question has been at the heart of many histories of rivers for a few decades. The collection of essays in Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube through Infrastructure, edited by Stefan Dorondel and Luminita Gatejel, enriches this literature with ten contributions by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists associated with two research projects led by the editors. Their investigations into the dynamics of “infrastructuring” (xi) deepen classical themes of this historiography and contribute in an original way to its development by placing the concept of “disturbance” at the center of their narratives of the relationship of modern communities with the Danube. Most notably, while standard narratives previously emphasized a one-way transformation of the river through human action, these imaginative essays show additional facets and convincingly highlight how natural processes maintain agency despite attempts to control them. In the end, the book invites one to go beyond boundaries between nature and technology by looking at “circular and spiraling dynamics” (2) between hydrological, socio-political, and technical processes.

The essays are diverse in terms of periods, locations, methodologies, and scales, and thus contribute in multiple ways to a very rich volume. Beyond the juxtaposition of the chapters, the editors set three objectives for the volume as a whole. First, they wish to overcome typical divisions within studies of the Danube that fracture it into its Upper, Middle, and Lower—or national—sections and present instead “stories that capture the transformation of the river as a whole” (11). At first glance, each of the essays still focuses on selected parts of the Danube watershed, from small towns to selected sections of the river and their national contexts. But it would admittedly be extremely hard to write accurate essays spanning the entire watershed—particularly when the tributaries of the Danube are also to be included in some of the contributions. Recurring themes among the contributions confer a more systematic character to the book overall, such as the accounts of infrastructure projects and building sites, the role of state authorities, or—in a more secondary manner—issues of knowledge. On the issue of the role of the state, several chapters propose an interesting view on the usual narratives of top-down impositions of infrastructural projects. While the dynamics of state-building and development projects for peripheral regions undeniably played a crucial role in the remaking of the Danube in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gatejel and Stelu Şerban show, for instance, how under particular circumstances local communities called for state interventions as well, suggesting more complex political dynamics.

The second objective of the book is to interrogate the remaking of the Danube over several centuries. The longue durée approach foregrounded by the editors is not applied in every chapter. Half of them take discrete events like floods as points of departure, and others investigate projects spanning over a few decades. But the comparison between these cases and a few longer studies renders the volume successful in rethinking the temporalities at play in the making of the modern Danube. Most of the chapters expand their scope beyond singular events, and even the floods appear as a “process” (219). Such events punctuated and intensified longer-lasting discussions and negotiations about the material arrangements of the river, which in turn produced their own (often unintended) material effects. Several chapters give insightful reflections about infrastructures as “a promise” (1) or as a “specter” (chapter 9 by Milica Prokić) in the form of recurring projects that were not necessarily realized. The book thus invites one to conceive of the modernization of the river as a slow process of adding “layer after layer” of infrastructure (12, 202). We could even wonder whether this blurring of periodizations could be taken further in future studies. Despite this processional approach, a binary opposition between “premodern” relationships to the river and “modernity” regularly comes back in the book. The absence of a clear point of rupture in time raises the question of the relevance of these concepts and leaves open questions of alternative ways to periodize narratives about the transformation of the environment.

The third major achievement of this book is to highlight the fruitful ways in which “disturbance,” a concept borrowed from ecological sciences, can be applied to the history of human-river relationships. The classical narrative, according to which humans disturb fluvial ecologies through their infrastructural interventions, is, of course, much present in the book. The studies of floods by Constantin Iordachi, Dorondel, Gertrud Haidvogel, Severin Hohensinner, and Martin Schmid lead to interesting reversals of perspective in this respect. The contributors invite us to consider such events as normal processes, despite the usual human perception of floods as threats. An original contribution of the book is then to propose that, if floods “disturb” anything at all, it is the internal social and political balances of riparian societies rather than the normal flow of the river (see especially Gatejel’s chapter). In this vein, Robert Nemes draws on a broad array of sources, notably newsreels for the cinema and internal administrative reports, to show that the 1956 flood in Hungary disturbed attempts to create unified national narratives. Steven Jobbitt is also very creative in his use of the concept of “disturbance,” as he treats the international treaty of Trianon as the main disturber of infrastructural projects on the Hungarian Danube and its tributaries.

The book is rich in many other conceptual propositions brought by the individual contributors. The repetition of theoretical sections at the start of each chapter occasionally makes the reading tedious and runs a bit against the unity of the volume. Certain chapters struggle more than others to efficiently include “disturbance” in their conceptual apparatus and writing. The profusion of small localities in the studies could also have benefited from a more developed and more easily readable iconography and cartographic work. But such limitations are probably inherent to the challenges of editing a collection of essays about an area and a topic as large as the Danube and its multiple transformations. The gaps and the heterogeneity of such a rich book will certainly give plenty of inspiring food for thought to future histories not only of the Danube but of other rivers as well.