Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta by Debjani Bhattacharyya (review)

Around 1690, a few officers of the British East India Company in Bengal decided to find a convenient and safe settlement for trade; they chose the spot where the city of Calcutta would emerge. They needed to be near enough to the sea and far enough away from the Mughal provincial capital and administration in the interior, with which the Company maintained an awkward relationship. The chosen location had the advantages of being on the right bank of the Hooghly (the more navigable part) and suitably distant from the Mughal bureaucracy. It was also sufficiently inland to be sheltered from the tsunamis for which the northern Bay of Bengal was famous.

A hundred years later, this place did not seem so great. The founders of Calcutta almost certainly did not imagine that the settlement would grow into a city of more than a 100,000 people in 1750, and 500,000 in 1850. Between these dates, the Company had become a government, first of a few districts in Bengal; then of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa; and after the conclusion of the Anglo—Maratha conflict in 1818, of a vast swathe of territory in northern and southern India. Calcutta was the capital of British India. Managing population growth, settlement, trade, and the military and naval infrastructure in and around the city was the state's primary concern. These state endeavors repeatedly hit a geographical obstacle.

The area that comprised Calcutta was formed of salt marshes, swamps, and land exposed to annual flooding due to monsoon rains and overflowing rivers. Land suitable for urban development did not appear as a fixed area on the map but as a seasonally changeable one. The waterways of the lower Bengal delta followed no fixed track either. They changed course and produced sandbanks from silt deposits. Thanks to undercurrents, seasonal variation in water flow, and siltation, navigating these rivers was a challenge. Making a capital city in such a place required the colonial state to understand its geography and, when possible, to modify it by technology and law to make it suitable for the expanding population and private enterprise to flourish. Such intervention was an interactive process of gathering knowledge, regulating land use, and promoting commerce that has continued into the present, using different tools but frequently drawing from the knowledge accumulated during the colonial times.

This dimension of state intervention remained underexplored in the many histories of the city until the publication of this book. Bhattacharyya credibly argues that geographical knowledge contributed to the capacity of the colonial power to manage its capital city, illustrating her case with several occasions or "moments" when the tools then available met with a challenge (37)—the construction of a harbor, the changing uses of the riverbank near the city, and the draining of the marshlands, to name three. The book effectively combines archival research with different fields of analysis (scientific/technical and legal/administrative). The analytical narrative has few parallels in imperial or economic history.

The introduction explains the project—"[s]tudying the political economy and the legal processes of converting marshes into a propertied geography in Calcutta"—and proclaims the need for "new methods for understanding mobile landscapes" (23). One of these methods involves examining how a concept of land as property emerged in a "watery terrain" (32). The rest of the book contains five substantive chapters. Chapter 1 describes Benjamin Lacam's failure to construct a harbor on the river in the 1770s because of the Company's withdrawal of its offer to give him land and permission. A long court case followed Lacam's petition for compensation. According to Bhattacharyya, the case dragged on for so long because the judges and administrators disputed Lacam's claim that his geographical data supported the viability of a harbor. At stake was an almost intractable question: "Was geography an unstable and an unreliable form of evidence; or was it...