Unruly Waters
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6. Benjamin Strauss, “Coastal Nations, Megacities, Face 20 Feet of Sea Rise,” Climate Central, July 9, 2015, accessed January 12, 2018, www.climatecentral.org/news/nations-megacities-face-20-feet-of-sea-level-rise-19217.
7. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History, Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222.
9. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
10. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).
11. Much of the scholarship on Chinese environmental history over the long term is surveyed in Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); see also Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). On India, key works include Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); C. J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), and Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
12. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1953), 26.
13. Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée,” Annales, economies, sociétés, civilisations 13 (1958), 725–753; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), quotation from Braudel on p. 23.
14. “Sampling device,” from Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 279.
15. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia,” Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 7 (2009): 1–29.
16. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 44–63.
17. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 48.
18. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: HarperCollins, 2007).
19. Peter D. Clift and R. Alan Plumb, The Asian Monsoon: Causes, History and Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vii.
20. Sunita Narain, Science and Democracy Lecture, Harvard University, December 4, 2017.
21. Gilbert T. Walker, “The Meteorology of India,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 73 (1925): 838–855, quotation on p. 839; Charles Normand, “Monsoon Seasonal Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (1953): 463–473, 469; A. Turner and H. Annamalai, “Climate Change and the South Asian Monsoon,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 587–595.
22. Bob Yirka, “Earliest Example of Large Hydraulic Enterprise Excavated in China,” Phys.org, December 5, 2017, accessed December 15, 2017, phys.org/news/2017-12-earliest-large-hydraulic-enterprise-excavated.amp.
CHAPTER TWO: WATER AND EMPIRE
1. “Madras Government request the Court of Directors’ sanction for the expenditure of 5000 rupees on deepening the Pamban Channel between India and Ceylon,” October 1833–March 1835, Board’s Collections: British Library [hereafter BL] India Office Records [hereafter IOR], F/4/1523/60207.
2. H. Morris, “A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District in the Presidency of Madras,” (1878): BL, IOR, V/27/66/18.
3. E. Halley, “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds and the Monsoons, Observable in the Seas Between and Near the Tropicks, with an attempt to assign the physical cause of the sail winds,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 16 (1686): 153–168.
4. The clearest explanations of the monsoon can be found in Peter J. Webster, “Monsoons,” Scientific American 245 (1981): 108–119; and Peter D. Clift and R. Alan Plumb, The Asian Monsoon: Causes, History and Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
5. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 2003), chapter 1; Jos Gommans, “The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. AD 1100–1800,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 1–23.
6. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 632–636.
7. Diana Eck, “Ganga: The Goddess in Hindu Sacred Geography,” in The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India, ed. John Hawley and Donna Wulff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 166–183; Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Harmony, 2012); Anne Feldhaus, Connected Places: Religion, Pilgrimage and the Geographical Imagination in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
8. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957); Kathleen D. Morrison, “Dharmic Projects, Imperial Reservoirs, and New Temples of India: An Historical Perspective on Dams in India,” Conservation and Society 8 (2010): 182–195; Kathleen D. Morrison, Daroji Valley: Landscape, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System (New Delhi: Manohar Press, 2009).
9. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192–1286 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
10. James L. Wescoat Jr., “Early Water Systems in Mughal India,” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 2, ed. Attilo Petruccioli (Rome: Carucci Editions, 1985), 51–57.
11. Babur Nama, trans. Annette Susannah Beveridge (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 93, 264–265. For later discussion of Mughal-era irrigation, see Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707) (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 24–36.
12. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 636–637.
13. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lieberman, Strange Parallels.
14. Gommans, Mughal Warfare.
15. Gommans, Mughal Warfare; The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, vol. 3, trans. H. Beveridge (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1910), 135–136.
16. Irfan Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), reference to Kanauj on plate 8B.
17. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, “The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48 (Fall 2014): 1–19.
18. Anthony Reid, “Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600–1850,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 31–52.
19. Armando Coresao, trans., The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 3:92–93.
20. Sinappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650–1740 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 98–99.
21. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (1988): 401–424; Richards, The Mughal Empire; Alam and Subrahmanyam, eds.
, The Mughal State; “giant pump” from Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 694–696.
22. David Ludden, “History Outside Civilisation and the Mobility of South Asia,” South Asia 17 (1994): 1–23.
23. H. V. Bowen, John McAleer, and Robert J. Blyth, Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company (London: Scala, 2011).
24. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
25. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1; Murari Kumar Jha, “The Rhythms of the Economy and Navigation along the Ganga River,” in From the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, ed. Satish Chandra and Himanshu Prabha Ray (New Delhi: Manohar, 2013), 221–247.
26. James Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan; or, The Mogul Empire (London: M. Brown, 1788), 280.
27. T. F. Robinson, “William Roxburgh, 1751–1815: The Founding Father of Indian Botany” (PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2003).
28. “A Meteorological Diary, & c. Kept at Fort St. George in the East Indies. By Mr William Roxburgh, Assistant-Surgeon to the Hospital at Said Fort. Communicated by Sir John Pringle, Bart. P.R.S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 68 (1778): 180–193.
29. Robinson, “William Roxburgh.”
30. Alexander Dalrymple, ed., Oriental Repertory (London: G. Biggs, 1793–1797), 2:58–59.
31. Record of proceedings at Fort Saint George, February 8, 1793, Madras Public Consultations, January 28–March 8, 1793, BL IOR, P/241/37.
32. Letter from William Roxburgh to Joseph Banks, August 30, 1791: BL, IOR, European Manuscripts, EUR/K148, ff. 243–47; Andrew Ross cited in Robinson, “William Roxburgh,” 224n4.
33. William Roxburgh, “Remarks on the Land Winds and their Causes,” Transactions of the Medical Society of London (1810), 189–211.
34. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 399–400.
35. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
36. Letter from William Roxburgh to Andrew Ross, February 14, 1793, in Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 73.
37. Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 56; Robinson, “William Roxburgh,” quotations on pp. 237–238, 241.
38. Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 656; E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 91–112; Terje Tvedt, Water and Society: Changing Perceptions of Societal and Historical Development (London: I.B. Tauris 2016), 19–44.
39. Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains & c. (London: J. Murray, 1854), 1:87.
40. James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, 1837), 90–93; on climate and racial thinking, see David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
41. Arthur Thomas Cotton, “Report on the Irrigation, & c., of Rajahmundry District” [1844], House of Commons Sessional Papers, XLI (1850), quotation on pp. 4–5 of Cotton’s report.
42. Cotton, “Report on the Irrigation, & c., of Rajahmundry District,” 13.
43. Arthur Cotton, “On a Communication between India and China by the line of the Burhampooter and Yang-tsze,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 37 (1867): 231–239, quotation on p. 232.
44. For a detailed account of their rivalry, see Alan Robertson, Epic Engineering: Great Canals and Barrages of Victorian India, ed. Jeremy Berkoff (Melrose, UK: Beechwood Melrose Publishing, 2013).
45. Anthony Acciavatti, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (New York: Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2015), 120.
46. James L. Wescoat Jr., “The Water and Landscape Heritage of Mughal Delhi,” accessed June 22, 2016, www.delhiheritagecity.org/pdfhtml/mughal/JW-the-water-and-landscape-heritage-of-mughal-delhi-Oct8.pdf.
47. Henry Yule, “A Canal Act of the Emperor Akbar, with some notes and remarks on the History of the Western Jumna Canals,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 15 (1846).
48. Proby Cautley, “On the Use of Wells, etc. in Foundations as Practiced by the Natives of the Northern Doab,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 8 (1839): 327–340.
49. Proby Cautley, Report on the Central Doab Canal, BL, IOR, V/27/733/3/1.
50. G. W. MacGeorge, Ways and Works in India: Being an Account of Public Works in that Country from the Earliest Times up to the Present Day (London: Archibald Constable & Company, 1894), 153.
51. B. H. Tremenheere, “On Public Works in the Bengal Presidency,” Minutes of Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers 17 (1858): 483–513.
52. Proby T. Cautley, Report on the Ganges Canal Works: from their Commencement until the Opening of the Canal in 1854, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1860), 3:2.
53. Jan Lucassen, “The Brickmakers’ Strike on the Ganges Canal in 1848–1849,” International Review of Social History 51 (2006) supplement: 47–83.
54. Ganges Canal Committee, A Short Account of the Ganges Canal (Calcutta: Ganges Canal Committee, 1854), 3; the Hindi version was published as Ganga Ki Nahar Ka Sankshepa Varnana (Agra: Ganges Canal Committee, 1854).
55. “Short Account of the Ganges Canal,” North American Review, October 1855, 81.
56. David Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 648–721; Mayo quoted in David Ludden, India and South Asia: A Short History (London: Oneworld, 2014), 150.
57. David Mosse (with assistance from M. Sivan), The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 29; Terje Tvedt, “‘Water Systems’: Environmental History and the Deconstruction of Nature,” Environment and History 16 (2010): 143–166, quotation on p. 160.
58. Amitav Ghosh, “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail,” Economic and Political Weekly, June 21, 2008, 56–62.
59. Henry T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges: An Exploration in the History of India’s Modernization through Science and Technology (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1960), 7–8, 13–16.
60. “Impediments to the Traffic on the Ganges and Jumna, arising from the number of customs chokeys,” (February 5, 1833), BL, IOR, F/4/1506.
61. Bernstein, Steamboats, 28–31.
62. Bernstein, Steamboats, 84–99.
63. David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
64. Bernstein, Steamboats, 99.
65. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 74; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
66. Ian Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
67. Minute by Lord Dalhousie to the Court of Directors, April 20, 1853, in Railway Construction in India: Select Documents, ed. S. Settar (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1999), 2:23–57.
68. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 221.
69. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853; Edwin Merrall, A Letter to Col. Arthur Cotton, upon the Introduction of Railways in India upon the English Plan (London: E. Wilson, 1860), quotations on pp. 8 and 47.
70. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 422–426, quotation on p. 426; Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2007).
71. C. H. Lushington, quoted in Tarasankar Banerjee, Internal Market of India, 1834–1900 (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1966), 90–91.
72. Quotation from Banerjee, Internal Market, 323; Dave Donaldson, “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure,” (working paper, MIT/NBER, 2010); Robin Burgess and Dave Donaldson, “Railroads the Demise of Famine in Colonial India,” (working paper, LSE/MIT/NBER, 2012).
73. On immobility see Joya Chatterji, “On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘Age of Mobility,’” Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017): 511–541; quotation from Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, 110.
74. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 220–221, 358; Madhav Rao, cited in Kerr, Engines of Change, 4.
75. Arnold, Science, Technology, and Medicine.
76. MacGeorge, Ways and Works, 328–331; Kerr, Engines of Change, 47–51.
77. Rudyard Kipling, “The Bridge Builders,” in The Day’s Work (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899), 3–50.
78. W. W. Hunter, Statistical Account of Bengal (London: Trubner & Co., 1877), 14:31. On railways and the ecology of malaria: Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State, and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010), 117–139.
79. New York Observer and Chronicle, December 8, 1864.
80. J. E. Gastrell and Henry F. Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone of the 5th of October 1864 (Calcutta: O.T. Cutter, 1866), 11, 31–32.
81. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 139.
82. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 109, 127.
83. Henry Piddington, The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms (London: John Wiley, 1848); description of “storm wave” in Henry Piddington, The Horn-Book of Storms for the Indian and China Seas (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1844), 20; Piddington’s inspiration was William Reid, An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms By Means of Facts (London: John Weale, 1838).
84. Gastrell and Blanford, Calcutta Cyclone, 11–13.