This article presents a study of the environmental, social and political consequences of the devastating earthquakes that rattled the British Indian province of Bengal between 1869 and 1934. Based on four major seismic events the Cachar earthquake of 1869, the Bengal earthquake of 1885, the Great Indian Earthquake of 1897 and the Bihar-Nepal earthquake of 1934 – it examines how these natural disasters intersected with colonial rule, the production of scientific knowledge, social hierarchies and emergent nationalist politics. Based on archival sources, contemporary accounts and scientific reports, the article shows that earthquakes were moments of critical exposure of the fragility of colonial infrastructure, a stimulus to scientific investigation, a magnifier of social inequalities and a generator of spaces for colonial imposition as well as indigenous action. The findings illustrate the nature of the relationship between natural hazards and human systems under the tide of British imperialism in South Asia. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
In this paper, I trace the history of hydrocentric views about Mesopotamia from classical antiquity to (post-)colonial Modernity. In particular, I focus on the development of classics-infused, Western-European descriptions of the Mesopotamian landscape and of its canal system and how these are related to Eurocentric, Orientalist stereotypes and to Western colonialism and Arab environmentalist practices through times. When we evoke the name ‘Mesopotamia’, our minds inevitably go to the development of agriculture, irrigation, sedentarism and human progress. Indeed, the alluvial plain enclosed by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, was known since antiquity for its irrigated fields, canals and grandiose buildings. This characterisation of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial plain has had a long-lasting influence on medieval and modern Western European conceptualisations and historiographical narratives of Mesopotamia, dominated by the water element and human efforts at controlling it through hydraulic technology. Besides influencing historiographical discourses, these views underscored European colonial designs and Iraqi nationalist and environmentalist agendas aiming at exploiting the Tigris and Euphrates water resources and the age-old canal system in order to ‘restore’ the ancient agricultural and commercial prosperity of Mesopotamia. In this paper I intend to trace the history of the genesis and development of hydro- and technology-centric discourses about Mesopotamia from antiquity to post-colonial modernity.
