Book chapter
Power and Silt
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
2018
Abstract
Gold – this is what the eighteenth-century monsoon traders often called the silty strip of land they saw as their ships approached the littoral coasts of the Bay of Bengal. One may debate whether it was a metonymy for the wealth hidden in the rich alluvium or simply the result of a common mirage created by the mangrove ecosystem. This silt, responsible for creating the lower Bengal Delta, will be the starting point of this book. There are many routes to understanding the genealogy of property in colonial India. One obvious point of entry is through the intellectual history of property regimes, while another one would be the treatment of property claims in court cases. Avoiding these common approaches, this chapter will take silt – or, to be more precise, the intractable soil–water admixture peculiar to the Bengal tidal basin – for understanding the material and social processes of making property in a swamp. Silt, as Kipling notes, is imbued with power and destruction, terms that characterize the fate of one of the East India Company’s merchants in eighteenth-century Calcutta.
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Details
- Title
- Power and Silt
- Creators
- Debjani Bhattacharyya
- Publication Details
- Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
- Series
- Studies in Environment and History
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press; United Kingdom
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- History
- Other Identifier
- 991019170126804721