This article engages with a long critical tradition, particularly amongst historians of India but also more generally within environmental and economic history, which describes the modern West's hubristic scientific domination of Asian environments. Confidence in the universal applicability of scientific knowledge, such critiques argue, justified one-size-fits-all technical schemes being exported across vastly different climates and societies, and landscape and communities reshaped to fit the rational visions of planners and engineers. The article examines the actual procedures of Indian canal engineering, whose protagonists ostensibly portrayed precisely this scientific hubris. It finds that even the most ‘scientific’ canal construction and management, borrowing ideas and procedures from steam engines and astronomy, involved precisely the sorts of local knowledge and social reliability evident in opposing forms of flexible, administrative irrigation management. While these two types of water management attempted literally to engineer two different political economies into India's agrarian landscape, in practice their management styles differed little. Both enlisted social and racial prejudice, rather than scientific knowledge, to defend the administrative superiority and actions of British officials. Instruments for economic governance and administrative control, it argues, thus derived as much from the colonial limits of ‘universal’ European science as from its global applicability.