The subject of this book is the Upper Rhine, an economically important stretch of the Rhine River between Basel and Mannheim, where Alpine runoff collects before journeying in a northwesterly direction toward the Netherlands and the North Sea. This area was the site of intense hydraulic engineering during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first for flood control (1817–1876), then for nautical navigation (1906–1923 and 1932–1964), then for hydroelectric power generation (1928–1932 and 1952–1977), and finally for floodplain rejuvenation (since 1988). It was also the focal point of intense international turmoil, as France and Germany battled for control of the river's right-bank provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which changed hands four times between 1871 and 1945, always as a consequence of war. It was a testimony to the cooperative spirit and tenacity of the water engineers on both sides of the Rhine that pathbreaking transformations could take place under such difficult political conditions. These transformations included the shortening of the river by eighty kilometers, the opening up of the former floodplain for agriculture and urban growth, the emergence of industrial giants such as BASF on its banks, the establishment of shipping lanes (including the Grand Canal d'Alsace) all the way through to Switzerland, as well as the construction of ten hydroelectric dams and locks.

The book's greatest strength lies in its detailed analysis of the day-to-day and year-to-year challenges that politicians, engineers, urban planners, scientists, industrialists, farmers, and ordinary citizens faced in the riparian states of Baden, the Palatinate, and Alsace, as they transformed the Upper Rhine from a broad floodplain interlaced with streams into a canalized and tightly regulated river bed. It is difficult to imagine a future scholar significantly modifying the author's careful reconstruction of the controversies and dilemmas that bedeviled these decision-makers at every step of the way. Christoph Bernhardt also succeeds in contextualizing the historical importance of Johann Gottfried Tulla, a Baden engineer known as the “tamer of the wild Rhine,” by highlighting the many other engineers and researchers who ultimately played a far larger role in creating the river's contemporary profile. These include some well-known names, such as Max Honsell, Theodor Rehbock, and Robert Lauterborn, as well as a myriad of lesser-known ones who collectively undertook one of the most extensive landscape reconstruction projects in modern European history. The book's useful graphs and maps are also worth highlighting, for they display the full scope of the rectification projects and illustrate the process of floodplain usurpation.

In the introduction, the author describes his book as a “social and institutional historical analysis of the transformation of a water-terrestrial ecosystem and its impact on society and state over the course of two hundred years” (33). This is a far more accurate summary of the book's contents than the book's subtitle, which translates as “A Transnational Environmental History of the Upper Rhine,” for the focus is transnational only in a limited way. Bernhard exploits German- and French-language archives and handles the diplomatic, political, and economic interplay between France and Germany over the rectification projects, yet pays scant attention to similar projects occurring elsewhere on the Rhine (e.g., in Switzerland and in the Netherlands), or to the influence of the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine (which oversaw the rectification projects) and of Rhine engineering elsewhere in Europe and around the globe. Similarly, the author offers a fascinating account of the spatial-political and spatial-economic debates and decisions regarding the Upper Rhine floodplain and its development, but pays remarkably little attention to the devastating environmental consequences—such as the catastrophic drop in biodiversity—that these engineering projects precipitated. To be sure, Bernhardt does not ignore the ecological dimension. He argues, for instance, that bio-rehabilitation began on the Upper Rhine in the 1920s and 1930s, not in the 1950s, as other scholars have argued, and suggests that the Nazis were more supportive of environmental causes than most scholars have previously acknowledged (see, for instance, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds., How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich [2005]). Bernhardt handles the problem of flooding—both natural floods and those created or exacerbated by engineering—with superb skill and detail, and his epilogue provides a succinct and lucid summary of rehabilitation efforts since the late 1980s. Nonetheless, this is primarily an institutional and social history of the Upper Rhine that focuses on the people and the institutions that transformed this mercurial stretch of the river into a reliable servant of the riparian states. It is only secondarily an investigation into the vast eco-damage that these massive, and sometimes ill-advised, engineering projects had on the river and its environs.