Engineering Edens on This 'Rivered Earth'? A Review Article on Water Management and Hydro-Resilience in the British Empire, 1860-1940s

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the management of fresh water in the British Empire from the 1860s to the 1940s. We argue that imperial water management shaped and responded to the imperatives of diverse ecologies and topographies, contrasting political and economic agendas and, not least, different colonial societies, technologies and lay expertise. Building on existing studies, we consider the broader ecological and social effects of water management on irrigated agriculture and cities as well as water supply and drainage, with a particular focus on India and Australasia. Although imperial ideologies of improvement impelled settlement, drove resource extraction and transformed environments, we argue that at times they also diminished the availability, quality and distribution of water. Engineering projects also benefited some groups but not others. We show that normative Anglo assumptions of productive lands and watered environments were often ill-matched with colonial ecologies and water availability, in some cases prompting anxieties about the quality and quantity of water. While these anxieties encouraged further hydrological interventions, we show that they often had unexpected and undesired consequences. We introduce the concept of ‘hydro-resilience’ to demonstrate how interventions in water management diminished the quality and quantity of water in ways that impacted unevenly on peoples and ecologies across the British Empire.

Histories of Technology and the Environment in Post/Colonial Africa: Reflections on the Field

“…The central position of Western actors within colonial networks of transfer and exchange needs to be reconsidered-as objects of study as well as in terms of their respective authority and influence. The history of medicine and science has been the vanguard in this line of study, repeatedly demonstrating the importance of indigenous medical, agrarian, or technical expertise within networks of colonial knowledge, from quinine prophylaxis to channel construction [48,[89][90][91]. Much discussed in recent years, for example, was the "Black Rice" thesis.…”

“…After the introduction of piped water, residents actually became more vulnerable to water shortages than they had previously been. See also [89] on the hydro-resilience of pre/colonial landscapes and people. 23 This body of literature particularly highlights the ambivalent reactions to technical modernity and urban life in the Global South.…”

Climate, weather, and water in history

“…As Parrinello's study suggests, interventions in hydrological regimes can exacerbate the impact of extreme weather events. In this regard, I have elsewhere advanced the concept of "hydro-resilience" to describe the ways in which colonial water control schemes had uneven impacts and unintended consequences, particularly for Indigenous peoples (Beattie & Morgan, 2017;Morgan, 2015). In British India, for example, engineering interventions "transformed the Orissa Delta from being a flooddependent agrarian regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape" (D'Souza, 2006, pp.…”

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