Scot McFarlane is a historical consultant at the Oxbow History Company and author of the forthcoming book “The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity.”

Observers of China’s rise, such as tech analyst Dan Wang, often argue that China’s engineering prowess is enabling it to leap ahead of the United States’ litigious society. Pointing toward projects like the Motou Hydropower Station (a new dam that will have triple the capacity of the already massive Three Gorges Dam), these critics argue that in a contest between a nation of lawyers and a nation of engineers, engineering indisputably wins.

But it was the lawyers, not the engineers, that spurred the United States’ rise as an industrial power.

Consider the first big American dams, built in the 1820s across the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts. Roman engineers had figured out how to build sizeable and durable dams 2,000 years ago, so it was certainly not technology that had limited their construction in the United States up until that point. Instead, common law protected people against the ambitions of the powerful — that is, until creative lawyers in the early 19th century transformed interpretations of existing precedents so rivers could power Lowell’s mills.

At the time, most people opposed dam building. New England farmers did not want their fields permanently flooded, and communities all along the rivers did not want to see their fisheries collapse. They petitioned legislatures and sometimes attempted to dismantle the dams, but their resistance eventually failed.

Judges ultimately converged on the doctrine of “reasonable use” that allowed mill owners to build dams. Even if the damage to existing river uses was substantial, that could still be outweighed by the future economic benefit of the dams. This doctrine, in other words, allowed lawyers and their clients to essentially seize property rights from farmers and fishermen for industrialists in the name of national growth.

Further legal innovations laid the groundwork for the mega-dams built on the Colorado, Columbia and Tennessee rivers in the 20th century. The federal government drew on its right to regulate commerce in the Constitution by arguing that these structures improved navigation.

As a result, the concept of reasonable use was nationalized, allowing the federal government to claim the rivers’ waterpower over all competing claims. These projects were intended to create jobs for laborers and engineers alike, but their work could only begin in the lawyers’ wake.

In stark contrast to this era (and to China today), the last 30 years in the United States has been a story not of dam building but removal, with New England leading the way.

Our oldest dams in particular have been torn down at a rapid rate, owing in part to their deterioration. As Bruce Babbitt, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, put it in the late 1990s, “Dams are not like the pyramids of Egypt that stand for eternity.” The 1999 removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River, ordered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, established a landmark precedent that free-flowing rivers should be prioritized.

But we’re not rebuilding our decrepit dams after we tear them down, either. And that is because the law began to change in the 1970s owing not just to environmental concerns, but also to the recognition that an undammed river has substantial economic value whether through increased recreation or development.

In Maine, I can now take my sons fishing for shad every May on the Kennebec — and lobstermen have a cheaper source of bait thanks to the returning fish. Sea-run fish, after all, are really just a form of energy transferred from the ocean to the interior.

These sorts of economic benefits, more than any environmentalist rationale, make choosing not to rebuild our dams a pragmatic choice. Meanwhile, we have numerous other sources of energy, western rivers like the Colorado River are drying up and the costs of rebuilding can be astronomical.

Rivers and lawyers share two defining qualities: flexibility and resilience. On rivers where big dams have come down, fish have returned at a scale beyond the most optimistic predictions. China’s engineering leaders may build bigger marvels to tame rivers and compete with the United States. But American strength lies in our ability to change our minds. Our crumbling dams do not signal decline. Instead, our strength as a nation is a dynamism rooted in the law, and in the rivers that sustain us.