Technology and Culture

This collective book is the result of an international symposium held at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture (ENSA) of Rennes in 2017. Dealing with the tidal-power industry around the world, it brings together contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from archaeology and engineering to law and economics. Its explicit prospective intent can be seen from its structure into three parts, entitled "Past," "Present," and "Future." International scholars working on the environmental history of energy (G. Massard-Guilbaud and C.-F. Mathis, Sous le soleil, 2019; U. Hasenöhrl and P. Kupper, Historicizing Renewables, 2021) and global history of technology (HOST project; L. Hilaire-Pérez G. Carnino, and A. Kobiljski, Histoire des techniques, 2016) will find its interest in the empirical contributions. The historical perspective is covered through archaeology and modern history in the first part, and two contributions dealing with the twentieth century in the second part. This review will focus on these two parts, their inputs, and the avenues they open up for a history of energy at the crossroads of the history of techniques and environmental history.

The first part provides an instructive overview of recent and ongoing research about tide mills in the world since the Middle Ages. It demonstrates the extent to which the history of techniques can inform environmental history through the study of energy converters. First, the presence of tide [End Page 382] mills at precise places reflects the state of the coastline at the time they were used, since they require specific environmental conditions to function (water level, tidal range, geomorphological conditions). They therefore bear witness to changing shorelines, which currently draw particular attention in the age of global warming (see G. Parrinello et al., "Shifting Shores of the Anthropocene," 2019). Second, their use and form reflect the relationship between local societies and their environments in several places around the Atlantic coasts (Brittany, but also Ireland, Britain, Maine, the Amazon estuary, and Algarve), where they were crucial to local economies, despite their global marginality. In some medieval Irish monasteries, tide mills were preferred for their regularity compared to river mills, long before industrialization and the massive use of coal. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Amazon estuary, large tide mills contributed to an important sugar industry based on the model of the plantation, whereas numerous smaller ones on the seventeenth-century Maine coastline supported the colonization of New England. More emphasis could have been placed on specific social contexts, international circulations, and their political implications. Several tide mills had a strategic role in international trade and power, at the edge of continents and oceans and their commercial and political networks, taking advantage of the continuous but inconstant flow of rivers and the intermittent but predictable flow of the tides. Their key place in some colonial and military ventures is remarkable: the Algarve mills in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries were a driving force behind the conquest of Morocco by the Portuguese monarchy. Tidal-powered cannon factories in the Loire estuary fed the French fleet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were also at the heart of slavery-based sugar complexes in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Amazon estuary, the memory of which still persists locally, raising striking heritage issues.

Two chapters in the second part of the book offer an overview of the history of the twentieth-century tidal-power industry, mainly in France. The environmental impact of the Rance plant, the first of its kind in the world, led to social conflicts and national technological lock-in, as no other plant was built in France after this first experience. The Rance plant, however, informed international projects, leading the authors to the observation of a French "paradox," i.e., the marginal aspect of tidal power in energy policies despite its pioneering nature in France (p. 22). An economic analysis geared toward promoting the tidal-power industry leads to the use of certain notions such as delay...