Our first panel focuses on the relationship between water and empire. Panelists will discuss the conflicting economic interests surrounding the use of water in the colonial state, the departure from colonial ideologies surrounding water use by independent states, and the ways in which colonialism shaped the experience of environmental disasters. These papers showcase the role of water in engendering and reflecting tensions between imperial governments and colonial subjects.
Chair: Faisal Husain (Georgetown) is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern environmental history. His dissertation project is titled 'Flows of Power: The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, 1546-1831.'
Commentator: Meredith McKittrick (Georgetown) is a professor of African history. Her published work includes To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity, and Colonialism in Ovamboland, Northern Namibia (2002). Professor McKittrick's current book project, 'The Redemption of the Kalahari: White Settler Society and the Agrarian Imagination in South Africa,' examines how local communities, colonial governments, and post-colonial states have claimed and utilized river resources in southern Africa.
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Aditya Ramesh (SOAS) |
Developing Water as Multi-Purpose in Colonial India
In 1934, the first multi-purpose reservoir to be built in colonial India, at what was a remote village known as Mettur in southern India, was inaugurated with much pomp and splendour. The Mettur Project as it was known, built on the river Cauvery, had a long and chequered history. Contemplated as early as the mid-nineteenth by military engineers of the Madras Province, the project did not fully come to fruition until the early decades of the twentieth century. This paper poses the question as to how the modern multi-purpose river valley project, one on which independent India staked its developmental future, became a possibility during colonial times. Reaching back into the second half of the nineteenth century, it will argue that interest from London financial markets in rendering Indian rivers productive, a famine in the 1870s, and the state being pushed to the forefront of building public works were all central to the first reservoirs being built in the 1880s. In the decades after the First World War, the colonial state sought to ‘develop’ the river in new ways, especially in relation to producing hydroelectricity. In the Madras Presidency, a province lacking coal, hydroelectricity was viewed as a way to expand and diversify the economy. It was however technological innovation on the construction site of the Mettur Project by colonial engineers, which finally allowed for conversion of water into hydroelectric power. Sensing the potential for economic profit, colonial engineers and revenue officials made plans to invite industries to create an industrial-urban town around the Mettur dam, alongside an organized fishery. However, the transformation of water into a multiple purpose resource was not a smooth one, as water for irrigation purposes came into conflict with water use for hydroelectricity. This paper tracks the uneasy arrival of the multi- purpose project in India, unravelling the global flows of finance and technology during the nineteenth century and inter-war era which facilitated it, and the local conflicts it created.
In 1934, the first multi-purpose reservoir to be built in colonial India, at what was a remote village known as Mettur in southern India, was inaugurated with much pomp and splendour. The Mettur Project as it was known, built on the river Cauvery, had a long and chequered history. Contemplated as early as the mid-nineteenth by military engineers of the Madras Province, the project did not fully come to fruition until the early decades of the twentieth century. This paper poses the question as to how the modern multi-purpose river valley project, one on which independent India staked its developmental future, became a possibility during colonial times. Reaching back into the second half of the nineteenth century, it will argue that interest from London financial markets in rendering Indian rivers productive, a famine in the 1870s, and the state being pushed to the forefront of building public works were all central to the first reservoirs being built in the 1880s. In the decades after the First World War, the colonial state sought to ‘develop’ the river in new ways, especially in relation to producing hydroelectricity. In the Madras Presidency, a province lacking coal, hydroelectricity was viewed as a way to expand and diversify the economy. It was however technological innovation on the construction site of the Mettur Project by colonial engineers, which finally allowed for conversion of water into hydroelectric power. Sensing the potential for economic profit, colonial engineers and revenue officials made plans to invite industries to create an industrial-urban town around the Mettur dam, alongside an organized fishery. However, the transformation of water into a multiple purpose resource was not a smooth one, as water for irrigation purposes came into conflict with water use for hydroelectricity. This paper tracks the uneasy arrival of the multi- purpose project in India, unravelling the global flows of finance and technology during the nineteenth century and inter-war era which facilitated it, and the local conflicts it created.
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John Doyle-Raso (Michigan State) |
The Water Politics of the Nile in Uganda: From Swamp Reclamation to Wetland Conservation, 1954-1995
Early British colonizers in Uganda associated swamps with disease, monsters, and unproductivity. They transformed extensive swampland into cities and farmland, calling it reclamation. After 1954, with the completion of the Owen Falls Dam across the Victoria Nile – the only outlet of Lake Victoria and one of two sources of the Nile – they found new resolve. Colonial development experts learned by engaging in Nile water politics that reclamation increases the amount of water in the lake basin, and argued successfully to their counterparts downstream that this water belongs to those reclaiming it. The late colonial and early independent governments of Uganda pursued reclamation because it provided a resource otherwise denied to East Africa under the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement: water for irrigation. Yet, in the late twentieth century, environmental policies worldwide shifted from swamp reclamation to wetland conservation. By renaming swampland as wetland – an innocuous new word – its preservation could be desirable (today, ecologists refer to a typology of wetlands, including bogs, fens, and swamps). Proponents cited ecosystem services, e.g. nutrient filtering and wildlife habitat, as reasons for preservation. They produced a new form of knowledge and recreated environmental institutions with the twinned aims of national and basin-wide resiliency, with the result that, in 1986, the Ugandan government banned reclamation in favour of wetland preservation. In 1995, Uganda became the first country in Africa with a national policy on wetlands. This paper narrates tensions between reclamation and conservation projects through the changing landscape of the Nile in Uganda, focusing in particular on the production of sugar and rice in eastern Uganda.
Early British colonizers in Uganda associated swamps with disease, monsters, and unproductivity. They transformed extensive swampland into cities and farmland, calling it reclamation. After 1954, with the completion of the Owen Falls Dam across the Victoria Nile – the only outlet of Lake Victoria and one of two sources of the Nile – they found new resolve. Colonial development experts learned by engaging in Nile water politics that reclamation increases the amount of water in the lake basin, and argued successfully to their counterparts downstream that this water belongs to those reclaiming it. The late colonial and early independent governments of Uganda pursued reclamation because it provided a resource otherwise denied to East Africa under the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement: water for irrigation. Yet, in the late twentieth century, environmental policies worldwide shifted from swamp reclamation to wetland conservation. By renaming swampland as wetland – an innocuous new word – its preservation could be desirable (today, ecologists refer to a typology of wetlands, including bogs, fens, and swamps). Proponents cited ecosystem services, e.g. nutrient filtering and wildlife habitat, as reasons for preservation. They produced a new form of knowledge and recreated environmental institutions with the twinned aims of national and basin-wide resiliency, with the result that, in 1986, the Ugandan government banned reclamation in favour of wetland preservation. In 1995, Uganda became the first country in Africa with a national policy on wetlands. This paper narrates tensions between reclamation and conservation projects through the changing landscape of the Nile in Uganda, focusing in particular on the production of sugar and rice in eastern Uganda.
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Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi (Princeton) |
The Production of a Tsunamic Memory: The 1945 Makran Tsunami in the Omani Sea
The littoral communities living across the Omani Sea and the British colonialists on November 28, 1945, witnessed the raging seascape and its towering waves—which reached a run-up height of 40 feet—that took with them thousands of lives in the aftermath of an earthquake measuring magnitude 8.1 in the Makran subduction zone. Expanding the UNESCO’s Oceanographic Commission project to document the accounts of the Makran 1945 tsunami eyewitnesses, I aim to contribute to tsunamic historiography and anthropology. I do so by situating the understanding of the phenomenon as socio-politically constituent of natural disasters’ collective memory. Despite being a historical event that was reported accordingly by the colonial security apparatuses, it is contextualized differently by the affected colonized populations. I ask, thus, on the one hand, how is it produced historically as a natural menace against the colonial coastal projects? And on the other, how have coastal communities perceived, interpreted, and remembered such a traumatic natural disaster? And in what ways has that reflected and shaped their geographic imaginations of nature as an agentive historical factor? This paper examines the native community memory in narrating lived encounters with a tsunami and compares it to that reported by the British colonialists using ‘narrative network analysis.’ Specifically, the analysis engages with the recorded native historical narratives in retelling the event as well as the colonial archival sources that have depicted it. Treated as distinctive sociohistorical productions of an environmental event that illustrate the varying social relations with the Omani Sea as a transcultural area, this paper demonstrates the making of the ‘tsunamic memory.’ It is analyzed as transcending its referential seismological nature in a shared space to be socio-historically embedded in and emblematic of indigenous geographic imagination, collective memory, and colonial relations with the colonized seascape and its environmental and social natures.
The littoral communities living across the Omani Sea and the British colonialists on November 28, 1945, witnessed the raging seascape and its towering waves—which reached a run-up height of 40 feet—that took with them thousands of lives in the aftermath of an earthquake measuring magnitude 8.1 in the Makran subduction zone. Expanding the UNESCO’s Oceanographic Commission project to document the accounts of the Makran 1945 tsunami eyewitnesses, I aim to contribute to tsunamic historiography and anthropology. I do so by situating the understanding of the phenomenon as socio-politically constituent of natural disasters’ collective memory. Despite being a historical event that was reported accordingly by the colonial security apparatuses, it is contextualized differently by the affected colonized populations. I ask, thus, on the one hand, how is it produced historically as a natural menace against the colonial coastal projects? And on the other, how have coastal communities perceived, interpreted, and remembered such a traumatic natural disaster? And in what ways has that reflected and shaped their geographic imaginations of nature as an agentive historical factor? This paper examines the native community memory in narrating lived encounters with a tsunami and compares it to that reported by the British colonialists using ‘narrative network analysis.’ Specifically, the analysis engages with the recorded native historical narratives in retelling the event as well as the colonial archival sources that have depicted it. Treated as distinctive sociohistorical productions of an environmental event that illustrate the varying social relations with the Omani Sea as a transcultural area, this paper demonstrates the making of the ‘tsunamic memory.’ It is analyzed as transcending its referential seismological nature in a shared space to be socio-historically embedded in and emblematic of indigenous geographic imagination, collective memory, and colonial relations with the colonized seascape and its environmental and social natures.
