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In the age of imperialism the British Empire imposed multiple projects of water management,like the Aswan Dam, on its colonies. These projects had to bring economic benefits to the colonies and coloniser while British politicians and engineers saw these projects also as an instrument to modernise and civilise the local people. This study explores the motivations behind the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt within the public discourse. Previous research has primarily relied on several political documents and technical reports about the Aswan Dam and has thus focused on the political and economic motivations behind the construction of the dam. Through economic and political perspectives these studies have characterised the dam as an economic project not only for the beneficence of Egypt, but also for the British Empire. This study, however, investigates newspaper articles from The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail between 1894−1902 from the planning to the completion of the dam. This is carried out through a discourse analysis to explore how the Aswan Dam was justified towards the public to add a new social-cultural perspective. Findings indicate that newspapers represented the dam within different social imaginaries as an achievement of British engineers, the British monarchy and the British Empire. The Aswan Dam was thus not only justified through economic purposes. The dam was rather represented in the newspapers as a way of bringing back the glory of Egypt and as “England’s greatest enterprise” that would make the British Empire surpass the great empires from the past.