In the first, from the early eighteenth century, Egyptian peasants had nearly complete autonomy over the function and repair of rural irrigation works. This fact was determined by the environmental realities of the countryside. Every village had a different topography and geography, and it was peasants whose families had lived and worked in a village for generations that knew how best to deal with water in that particular local environment.
By contrast, in the second project from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the state forcibly enlisted the labor of hundreds of thousands of Egyptian peasants to dig and reinforce a major canal. As the Egyptian state developed ever more robust and detailed administrative practices, it sought to subsume peasant labor within its bureaucratic apparatuses to be put toward these ever larger infrastructural projects. Peasants were thus forcibly moved to worksites, breaking centuries of attachment to local environments. When peasants were disconnected from their villages, their intimate knowledge of local environments slowly began to fade. Without the benefit of this wealth of peasant knowledge and experience, irrigation repair projects could not be carried out as efficiently and effectively as was previously the case. The results were thus not only the human suffering of forced labor, but also environmental degradation and new configurations of peasant politics in the Egyptian countryside.