Water, Coal, Wheat: Irrigation, Colonial “Development,” and the Space-Time of Fossil Capitalism

• In Event: Marxist Ecology and the Problem of Non-Western Development

Abstract

How might we write the history of colonialism into the history of fossil capitalism? One recent approach has sought to excavate histories of fossil fuel extraction (and consumption) in various colonial contexts, drawing attention to their non-synchronicity in relation to the industrialization of coal use in the imperial core. This paper suggests that the colonial history of fossil capitalism is more expansive than the histories of coal, combustion, and fossil capital in the colonies. It does so by exploring the contradictory relations of productivity and plunder that facilitated the expansion of commercial capitalism in the late-19th century with reference to irrigation and commodity production in colonial Punjab. In India, this conjuncture was marked by massive yet geographically uneven investments in infrastructure that sought to articulate its regional agrarian economies to the world market. Alongside the construction of railways, roads, and ports, colonial “development” included the expansion of perennial irrigation in the semi-arid territories of northwestern India, which were transformed, in the span of three decades, into a leading wheat and cotton frontier. Drawing on the case of Punjab, this paper develops a conceptualization of perenniality as a contradictory, historically-specific form of socio-natural organization deployed in a range of colonial and settler-colonial geographies as a consequence of fossil-fueled transformations in the geopolitical economy of world capitalism. It argues that perennial irrigation was fundamentally constitutive of a broad ensemble of environmental strategies that responded to the transforming spatiotemporal and biophysical imperatives of commercial capitalism, notably the drive to reduce turnover time and accelerate velocities of circulation. Colonial irrigation in Punjab is consequently situated within a conjunctural historical geography of irrigation, ranging from the Nile Valley to the western United States, in order to theorize the relationship between steam-powered transportation, inter-imperial competition, and uneven development in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Author

• Swarnabh Ghosh, Harvard University