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Engineering the Empire: British Water Supply Systems and Colonial Societies, 1850–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

John Broich
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 346 - 365
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2007

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References

1 Christopher Hamlin has shown that, at the beginning of the sanitary and water reform movement, sanitarians such as Edwin Chadwick fought and won contests to determine how “improvement” was to be defined and achieved; that is, it was decided to treat the side effects of poverty, poisonous by-products that threatened the British workforce and threatened to expand into middle-class circles, instead of the root causes of poverty and disease. Hamlin, Christopher, Public Health and Social Justice in an Age of Chadwick, Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 Joyce, Patrick, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 70–75Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 70.

4 Scott, David, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 200Google Scholar.

5 Joyce draws analogies between certain expressions of metropolitan and colonial governmentality but, presumably because of a lack of case studies, fails to recognize the water infrastructure of the colonial city as the domain of governmentaility, just as it was in Britain. Joyce, Rule of Freedom, 253–57.

6 This work has turned away from an earlier tendency to simply describe how technologies were thrust upon colonial societies as tools of empire. See, e.g., Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.

7 Arnold, David, Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India, 1760–1947 (Cambridge, 2000), 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid., 92–93; Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 99–116Google Scholar, and elsewhere; Henry, R. J., “Technology Transfer and Its Constraints: Early Warnings from Agricultural Development in Colonial India,” in Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947, ed. Macleod, Roy and Kumar, Deepak (London, 1995), 51–77Google Scholar.

9 Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993), 17–18, 238Google Scholar; Ahuja, Ravi, “‘The Bridge Builders’: Some Notes on Railways, Pilgrimage, and the British ‘Civilizing Mission’ in Colonial India,” in Colonialism as Civilising Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, ed. Fischer-Tiné, Harald and Mann, Michael (London, 2004), 106–8Google Scholar; Gadgil, Madhav and Guha, Ramachandra, “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India,” in Peasant Resistance in India, 1858–1914, ed. Hardiman, David (Delhi, 1992), 258–95Google Scholar.

10 Exceptions include some studies on British India's canal systems as led by Elizabeth Whitcombe's important work in which she describes the waterlogging, salinization, and epidemiological consequences of the projects and Timothy Mitchell's examination of the High Aswan Dam's epidemiological and social backfire. See Whitcombe, Elizabeth, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India: The United Provinces under British Rule, 1860–1900 (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar; Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar; D’Souza, Rohan surveys the literature on British water systems on the subcontinent in “Water in British India: The Making of a Colonial Hydrology,” History Compass 4 (2006): 621–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Although, Harrison notes that public health initiatives were restrained by the fear of inciting civil unrest; Harrison, Public Health in British India, 116.

12 See, for only a few examples, Worster, Donald, Dust Bowl (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Dean, Warren, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; Orsi, Jared, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley, 2004)Google Scholar.

13 Second Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, Parliamentary Papers, vol. 18 (London, 1845), 2Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 50.

15 For an important work on Chadwick and his assumptions about disease and society, see Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice.

16 O’Brien, W., “Supply of Water to the Metropolis,” Edinburgh Review 91 (April 1850): 384Google Scholar.

17 John Garwood, quoted in W. Archdall O’Dougherty, Water for Domestic Use: Evils Attending the Use of Impure Water, to Health, to Purse, and to Morals (n.p., 1862), 21. This source quotes many reformers on what they viewed as the close connection between poor water quality and alcohol abuse among the poor. Also, Edwin Chadwick linked insufficient water to the dirty state of the masses and their quarters and the dirty state of his or her quarters to the disgrace of the working-class individual and that disgrace to the predilection to drink. He reported in 1842 that the “undrained” abode “has an effect on the moral habits by acting as a strong and often irresistible provocative to the use of fermented liquors.” Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842; repr., Edinburgh, 1965), 196–97Google Scholar.

18 Morely, John, “Piping Days,” Household Words 10 (14 October 1854): 197–98Google Scholar.

19 Silverstone, Arthur, The Purchase of Gas and Water Works: With the Latest Statistics of Municipal Gas and Water Supply (London, 1881), 88–125Google Scholar.

20 The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act eliminated all existing corporations—the city of London's local government excluded—and created town councils in their places. These new councils had relatively few responsibilities specified at first. See Fraser, Derek, “Introduction: Municipal Reform in Historical Perspective,” in his Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (New York, 1982), 1–6Google Scholar, and Power and Authority in the Victorian City (New York, 1979), 164Google Scholar.

21 Peter Ellerton Russell, “John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman, FRS, Water Engineer, 1810–1889” (master's thesis, University of Manchester, 1980), 59–60.

22 Ibid., 25, 59–60.

23 Leicester, Rochdale, and other towns built Hawkesley gravitation schemes; see Roney, Scott Edward, “Trial and Error in the Pursuit of Public Health: Leicester, 1849–1891” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2002), 80Google Scholar; Leicester Water Undertaking, 1847–1874 (Leicester, 1974), 59Google Scholar; and Taylor, Rebe, Rochdale Retrospect (Rochdale, 1955), 127–28Google Scholar. Simpson promoted the system for Aberdeen and Liverpool; see Simpson, James, Report on the Most Efficient Means of Obtaining an Increased Supply of Water to the City of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1855), 11Google Scholar; Simpson, James and Newlands, James, Liverpool Water Supply (Liverpool, 1849), 10, 34, 48–50Google Scholar. For Rawlinson, see The Times, 2 June 1898, 6.

24 It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of his gravitation systems. Even his only biographer can offer only a range of the number of reservoirs he completed, seventy to eighty, and some of those were not for drinking water. Bateman also promoted some schemes that were adopted by town councils but never completed. I derive my figure of fifty from Russell, “John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman,” 176, 182, 199–200, 211, 263; and J. F. Bateman, “On a Constant Water Supply for London: A Paper read at a Meeting of the Health Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science” (n.p., 1867; in the possession of the Institution for Civil Engineering, London), 1. Geoffrey Binnie counts thirty completed; Binnie, Geoffrey, “The Evolution of British Dams,” in Dams, ed. Jackson, Donald C. (Aldershot, 1998), 94Google Scholar.

25 Russell, “John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman,” 133. Chadwick, of course, was not solely responsible for Bateman's conversion to a professional water supply engineer, but Bateman's biographer attributes much influence to the activity of the Health of Towns Association and the 1844–45 Health of Towns Commission; see Ibid., 105. Prior to 1844, Bateman had promoted only one project devoted solely to drinking water for Brighton in 1842; it was completed in 1849; see Ibid., 124.

26 Russell, “John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman,” 176, 182, 211.

27 Maver, Irene, Glasgow (Edinburgh, 2000), 91Google Scholar.

28 Gravitation schemes quickly became renowned for their great cost, and some critics saw their designers as profligate. Russell, “John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman,” 207. In Ceylon, Colonial Office officials recognized that the gravitation scheme was more expensive than alternatives, but they ultimately supported it nonetheless because their engineer represented it as the best. Minutes of R. Meade, “The Gravitation Scheme for Colombo Water Supply,” 21 April 1877, The National Archives: Public Record Office (hereafter TNA: PRO) CO 54/510, 1877.

29 Conybeare, Henry, On the Supply of Water to Bombay (Bombay, 1854), 54–55, 68Google Scholar, and Second Report on the Supply of Water to Bombay (Bombay, 1855), 14Google Scholar.

30 The chief public works commissioner for the city of eighty-four thousand sought Binnie out for his expertise and wrested him away from the Government of India's Public Works Department in 1870. See Central Provinces Public Works Department, Nagpur and Ambajerry Water Works (Nagpur, 1873), 3Google Scholar. For more on Binnie's Nagpur project in general, see also Morris, J. M., Description of the Nagpur (Ambajhari) Water-Works (Bombay, 1872)Google Scholar.

31 Central Provinces Public Works Department, Nagpur and Ambajerry Water Works, 4.

32 Alexander Binnie, Nagpur Water Works: Report to the Members of the Managing Committee, 30 September 1873, 11 and 13, Institution of Civil Engineers Archives, London, 1873BINCPW. Shortly after building his Nagpur gravitation scheme, Binnie returned to England to construct a gravitation scheme for Bradford. In 1889 Binnie became the first chief engineer of the London County Council and proposed a gravitation scheme for London that called for the importation of water over 150 miles from Wales—a scheme that London's local government intended to build but for which it could not secure authority from Parliament.

33 Ceylon Observer, 15 October 1888, reprinted in A Holiday Trip to Labugama: The Source of the Colombo Water Supply (Colombo, 1891), 85–86Google Scholar.

34 Letter of J. McNair to the Colonial Office, 9 April 1878, 6–7, TNA: PRO CO 273/94, 1878, vol. 2.

35 The government made its request in 1883. Tudsbery, John Turner, “The Construction of the Yokohama Water-Works,” in Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 18 February 1890 (London, 1890), 277–89Google Scholar.

36 Higuchi, Hiro, The Biography of Major-General H. S. Palmer, R.E., F.R.A.S. (Tokyo, 2002), 56Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 72.

38 Meade, “Gravitation Scheme for Colombo Water Supply.”

39 Conybeare, Henry, Report on the Sanitary State and Sanitary Requirements of Bombay (Bombay, 1852), 3Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., 22.

41 Ibid. A member of Ceylon's legislative council argued for water reform for Colombo on the basis of a report on the sanitary condition of Glasgow made by Dr. Lyon Playfair, an eminent sanitarian. Councilor Dunlap is quoted in the Ceylon Observer, 5 November 1874, 566.

42 Chadwick, Osbert, Report on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong (London, 1882), 41Google Scholar.

43 Ibid.

44 Letter of J. McNair to the Colonial Office, 9 April 1878, 9–10, TNA: PRO CO 273/94, 1878, vol. 2.

45 Colonial Office Dispatch, 1 June 1878, 1–4, TNA: PRO CO 273/94, 1878, vol. 2.

46 Ferguson, John, Ceylon in the Jubilee Year (Colombo, 1887), 118Google Scholar.

47 A. W. Burnett, Report on the Colombo Waterworks (n.p., 1890), 76.

48 Horie, Katsumi, The Earthquake Disaster and Reconstruction of Water Supply Works in Yokohama (Yokohama, 1930), 10, 12, 39Google Scholar.

49 Tulloch, Hector, The Water Supply of Bombay: Being a Report to the Bench of Justices of that City (London, 1872), 23Google Scholar.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 25.

52 Tomlinson, S., Bombay Municipality Water Works, Pawai Project (Bombay, 1889), 1–2Google Scholar.

53 Tulloch, Water Supply of Bombay, 19, pl. 3.

54 Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, 1892 (Calcutta, 1894), 194Google Scholar; Tomlinson, Bombay Municipality Water Works, 5.

55 Letter of Sir W. Robinson to the Colonial Office, 1 June 1878, 20–22, TNA: PRO CO 273/94, 1878, vol. 2. For the removal of farmers, see also Municipality, Singapore, Singapore Municipality Waterworks: Opening of New Works (Glasgow, 1912), 14Google Scholar.

56 For Colombo, see Holiday Trip to Labugama, 14; for Hong Kong, see Yin, Ho Pui, Water for a Barren Rock: 150 Years of Water Supply in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 2001), 30Google Scholar.

57 Harrison, Public Health in British India, 173.

58 Tinker, Hugh, The Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan, and Burma (London, 1954), 58Google Scholar. This story repeated in Harrison, Public Health in British India, 174.

59 For a few examples of health reformers’ attitudes toward well water supplies in Britain, see Elliot, Malcolm, Victorian Leicester (London, 1979), 126Google Scholar; Dale, Thomas, On the Supply of Water to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Towns from the Lake Districts of Cumberland and Westmoreland (London, 1866), 4–5Google Scholar; Burnet, John, History of the Water Supply of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1869), 2Google Scholar. On colonial sanitarians’ instincts for suspecting native wells, see, for just a few examples among many, Proceedings of Third All-India Sanitary Conference, Held in Lucknow, January 1914 (London, 1914), 188–89Google Scholar; Chadwick, Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong, 17.

60 Public Utilities Board, Yesterday and Today: The Story of Public Electricity, Water, and Gas Supplies in Singapore (Singapore, 1985), 9Google Scholar. For the Health Department closing wells in Singapore, see also Wright, Arnold, Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources (London, 1908), 606Google Scholar.

61 Sheppard, Samuel Townsend, Bombay (Bombay, 1932), 108–9Google Scholar; Dossal, Mariam, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845–1875 (Bombay, 1991), 117Google Scholar.

62 Native Opinion, 9 October 1892, reprinted in Report on Native Newspapers Published in the Bombay Presidency and Berar, 1892 (Bombay, 1893), sec. 42, 16–17Google Scholar.

63 Rustom Pestonji Masani, Folklore of Wells: Being a Study of Water-Worship in East and West (Bombay, 1918), 4–5Google Scholar.

64 Ibid., 4–9, 20.

65 Ibid., 11. Masani writes that, even after they had been filled in, townspeople continued to leave sacrifices above two particularly important wells (ibid., 23–24).

66 Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 193.

67 The writer rejected the guidelines of British sanitarians as actually detrimental to public health (Hindusthán, 18 September 1892, reprinted in Report on Native Newspapers Published in the Bombay Presidency and Berar, 1892, sec. 39, 19).

68 Asad, Tal, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, vol. 1, ed. Gailey, Christine (Gainesville, FL, 1992), 337Google Scholar.

69 Letter of Henry Conybeare to Lord Elphinstone describing surveying expeditions, 4 November 1853, India Office Records MSS Eur F87/154, British Library.

70 Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy to Lord Elphinstone, 26 October 1854, India Office Records MSS Eur F87/163, British Library, 5, 8, 10.

71 Ibid., 1.

72 Ibid., 10.

73 Ibid., 4.

74 Hughes, A. W., A Gazeteer of the Province of Sind, 2nd ed. (London, 1876), 378Google Scholar.

75 Rustomji, Behram Sohrab H. J., Karachi, 1839–1947 (Karachi, 1952), 125Google Scholar.

76 Baillie, Alexander F., Kurrachee: Past, Present, and Future (Calcutta, 1890), 107Google Scholar.

77 See numerous expressions of this attitude among imperial officials and observers in Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 238 and elsewhere.

78 Rustomji, Karachi, 125.

79 This project was designed by municipal engineer James Strachan. It was not a classic gravitation scheme in that it did not include flooding a valley or raising a lake behind an embankment. Instead, the Karachi scheme called for the excavation of two 45,000-cubic-foot wells or tanks. The water was imported from these tanks under gravity through a single pipeline over sixteen miles. The water was stored in a distribution reservoir above the town and reached Karachi under sufficient pressure to reach the upper floors of houses. Baillie, Kurrachee, 110–12.

80 Ceylon Observer, 24 October 1874, 540; Ceylon Observer, 28 October 1874, 551.

81 Ceylon Observer, 22 December 1874, 651.

82 Chadwick, Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong, 2.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., 42.

85 “Discussion on Water-Works in China and Japan,” in Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 18 February 1890, 100, 291–92.

86 Tinker, Foundations of Local Self-Government, 290–91.

87 See Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions; Mackenzie, John, “Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment,” in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Griffiths, Tom and Robin, Libby (Seattle, 1997), 218–19Google Scholar.

88 Goswami, Manu, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004), esp. chaps. 2 and 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 274–80; Harrison, Public Health in British India, 170–83.

90 Dossal, Imperial Designs.

91 The foundational works in this genre are Crosby, Alfred, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972; repr., Westport, CT, 1990)Google Scholar, and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar. For another important example among many, see Melville, Elinor G. K., A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 The most important work in this genre is Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

93 See D’Souza's survey, “Water in British India.”

94 William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis is the critical exemplar of this kind of environmental history in the American context; Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

95 In addition to Joyce, see Otter, Chris, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City,” Social History 27, no. 1 (January 2002): 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.