Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta - The Making of Calcutta

Summary

Historian Debjani Bhattacharyya traces how a distant colonial power tried to tame the world’s largest tidal delta, from 1760 to 1920. Looking past stories of decline, she puts ‘property-thinking’ – splitting land and water into separate categories to manage and own – at the heart of draining Calcutta, with consequences still visible in the Bay of Bengal’s receding coastline.

Rationale

Its ‘property-thinking’ is a deep disposition in all but name: a way of seeing written into law and land, still shaping a coastline long after the empire has gone.