Book Reviews Jir ˇı ´ Jana ´c ˇ, European Coasts of Bohemia. Negotiating the Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal in a Troubled Twentieth Century (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2012). pp. 273. ISBN 978-90-8964-501-2 hbk Reviewed by: Darina Martyka ´nova ´, Universidad Auto ´noma de Madrid, Spain Jirˇı´ Jana´ cˇ’s book on the history of a major waterway project in Central Europe is a rare achievement. Efficiently combining history of technology with political his- tory, the author succeeds in making remarkable contributions to both fields. Projects and associations striving for the integration of transport networks, including waterways, appeared in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first plan to build a canal connecting the rivers Danube, Oder and Elbe (DOE) – and thus overcome the European watershed and link three seas – was officially formulated in the 1901 Austrian Imperial Waterway Act. The canal has not yet been built, and its construction does not seem likely in the foreseeable future, but the longevity of the project is striking. The original proposals were appropriated and reshaped by different regimes, such as the inter-war liberal-democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi authorities, the communist Czechoslovakia and the post-communist Czech Republic integrating to the European Union. The book argues that the different versions of the DOE project were based on and promoted several often conflicting geopolitical visions of space. In the first decades of the twentieth century, some of its promoters understood this waterway as a tool for strengthening the cohesion of the Austria – Hungary Empire, or, later, the nation-state of Czechoslovakia. For others it represented an energising blood vessel of the German Mitteleuropa. These specific aims were often compatible with larger scale visions of an integrated European or even a global transport system that would be made possible by the experts’ striving for standardisation, ideally based on technical criteria. The author shows how, for example, engineers in the communist Czechoslovakia, including those who seem to have been active sup- porters of the regime, continued to think and plan the waterway transport systems in the framework of Europe. Including Ukraine and western Russia, as well as Western and Central Europe in their waterway transport plans, they not only continued to promote what Schot and Lagendijk have defined as technocratic inter- nationalism that characterised their pre-war colleagues, but even came to imagine a broader field of action, expanding their projects eastwards. Regarding this common The Journal of Transport History 2016, Vol. 37(1) 96–120 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022526616640432 jth.sagepub.com