Speculation

At the turn of the twentieth century, urban housing and property speculation emerged as objects of bureaucratic management and regulatory concern for colonial officials in British India. New instantiations and circuits of commerce in urban land and housing had burst upon the municipal administration, surpassing long-standing concerns around epidemiology and town planning that dominated nineteenth-century urbanism. While the medico-municipal histories of colonial urbanization are familiar, we know little about the emergence and process of commerce in land and the manner in which it produced particular formations of the urban. By understanding how the new instruments of commerce transformed land and housing into a highly volatile “exchangeable title” in the early decades of the twentieth century, this article provides a long history to our contemporary “residential capitalism.”¹

The chartered joint-stock East India Company did not begin its career in India merely as a tax collector but instead as a land speculator, leaving behind a significant imprint on the cultural history of the land market and on the economic history of British presidency towns.² The early decades of the twentieth century present a unique convergence of three strands of historical forces whose operations were etched on the colonial land market: the globalizing and standardizing tendencies of the economy, comprehensive town-planning projects, and the gathering momentum of working-class politics. If one were to turn to the local municipal debates from the presidency town of Bombay in western India to Rangoon in British Burma, she would be confronted with two questions about this historical juncture. One is a historiographical question and the other methodological. First, why, at this particular moment in history, was there a concerted effort to understand and regulate housing speculation within the municipal domain? Second, what new insights do we stand to gain from using speculation as an analytic to investigate colonial urbanization? Analyzing this particular moment—especially the period following World War I up to the years before the Great Depression—demonstrates that the production of the urban at the turn of the twentieth century took place in the crucible of private landlordism and philanthropism; regulatory projects of quasi-market bodies like improvement trusts, builders lobbies, and land syndicates; and the gathering momentum of housing rights and social welfare politics.

Privatizing urban land for unregulated profit in the name of public purposes has deep roots in nineteenth-century colonial histories in South Asia. Urbanization under the joint-stock East India Company and later Crown rule is narrated through the large rubric of segregation: racial; caste- and class-based; and based in the colonial politics of disciplining indigenous populations, bodies, movements, and experiences. However, who were the actors that today’s historiography deems the “colonial”? How was a private market in land developed and funded amid epidemiological, racial, and colonial politics? What were the unique aspects of the circuits of credit, debt, speculation, and hoarding that orchestrated the business of building in India over the last century and half? Existing historiography sheds only a partial light upon these questions. For instance, in 1923, after extensive colonial legal codification, some of the British municipal officials and members of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce lobbied the Bengal Legislative Council for four years for a specialized Land Court in Calcutta. The purpose of the Land Court, they argued, was to efficiently assess the supposedly incomprehensible land titles through which the “natives” held their property.³ These officials insisted that the property and housing crisis in colonial Calcutta that ensued during World War I could be tackled only by disciplining indigenous forms of ownership and enabling an easy transfer of land to the municipal body for public works. Their justification runs as follows:

In the background there lurks the greater danger of dubious titles with its restricting influence on the number and extent of all transactions in land, while there are also special difficulties inherent in the law and customs of Bengal, such as joint-family ownership, widow’s rights, wakf [Muslim charitable property] and debattar [property dedicated for Hindu religious purposes]. We have considered whether these difficulties might not be met to some extent at least by the...