Infraestructural power and territory control.

The floods of the Province of Santiago de Chile at the end of the XIX century

Abstract

This study analyzes the floods of the late nineteenth century in the Province of Santiago, in the context of the bureaucratic deployment of the State of Chile during that century. We use the concepts of infrastructure power and the hydrosocial network. Through the qualitative analysis of primary burocratic sources and of the written press of the time, as well as secondary bibliography related to the subject in question, the strength of the power of the Chilean State in the Province of Santiago is evaluated. Both the effects of rainfall on Santiago’s urban and water infrastructure, such as the bureaucratic reaction and its deployment of resources in the face of this natural emergency, would prove that the infrastructural power of the nineteenth-century State would have been less than usually estimated.