Abstract
The second half of the nineteenth century is often referred to as the period of high imperialism in colonial India. As suggested in the previous chapter, this period had at least two characteristics. First, trade became Britain’s dominant mode of exploiting India’s resources. Second, the colonial state increasingly became interventionist. It particularly intervened to create conditions for “economic development” in order to increase agricultural exports from India to serve Britain’s needs. This economic intervention was partly expressed in the form of the state’s promotion of infrastructure projects such as the railways. Indeed, railways expanded so rapidly that by the end of the century, India had the largest and most advanced railway network among Britain’s colonies.1
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Notes
D. M. Morris and C. B. Dudley, “Selected Railway Statistics for the Indian Subcontinent (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), 1853–1946–47,” Artha Vijnana XVII(3) (September 1975): 194–5.
I. J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–1900 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 147.
This involved forcing liquid creosote, an oily liquid distilled from coal tar, under pressure into sleepers. Creosoted sleepers lasted from twelve to eighteen years while noncreosoted ones lasted six to seven years in Britain. See W. H. Mills, Railway Construction (London: Longman, Green, 1900), 213.
J. Simmons, The Railways of Britain: An Historical Introduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 90; Mills, Railway Construction, 209.
G. N. Rao, “Political Economy of Railways in British India, 1850–1900,” Artha Vijnana 20(4) (December 1978): 404; S. Bose and A. Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 103. This payment for British manufactured equipment was a part of the annual Home Charges remitted by the colonial government from Indian revenue, that is, part of colonial profits to the British government and private companies.
J. Hurd, “Railways.” In The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2, ed. D. Kumar, 752 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); N. Charlesworth, British Rule and the Indian Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1985), 59.
M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 122.
H. F. Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens of South India (London: W. H. Allen, 1861), 33.
Ibid., 3; italics added.
Government of Madras. Report of the Madras Railway Department for 1858 (Madras, 1859), 30.
B. Weil, “Conservation, Exploitation, and Cultural Change in the Indian Forest Service, 1875–1927,” Environmental History 11(2) (2006): 335.
The deodar was generally found between 5000 and 8000 feet above the sea level. See Punjab Provincial Gazetteer, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Punjab, Vol. I (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1889), 73.
R. S. Troup, Indian Forest Utilization (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1913), 75; PWD (Railway) Proceedings for March 1861; PWD (Governor-General) Proceedings for June 1863, Proceeding No. 11.
Although Grove (Green Imperialism) argues that conservationist motives informed the implementation of forest conservation in India, recent studies have shown that forest officials/scientists in the Punjab promoted conservation in economic terms such as timber crisis for railways that led the state to establish forest conservation (V. Saberwal, Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats, and Conservation in the Western Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); P. Das, “Hugh Cleghorn and Forest Conservancy in India,” Environment and History 11(1) (2005): 55–82).
Before 1860, the earliest instances of forest conservancy establishment in colonial India were in 1847 in the Bombay Presidency and in 1856 in the Madras Presidency. See E. P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, Vol. I (London: John Lane, 1922), 219. However, forest conservancy in these provinces “hardly rose above the level of a revenue administration.” See B. Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1900), 71.
E. P. Flint, “Deforestation and Land Use in Northern India with a Focus on Sal (Shorea robusta) Forests, 1880–1980.” In Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. H. Grove, V. Damodaran, and S. Sangwan, 439 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
I. M. Saldanha, “Colonialism and Professionalism: A German Forester in India,” Economic and Political Weekly XXXI(21) (1996): 1268; italics added. Deodar, teak, and sal were considered by the colonial state to be the most valuable trees since they were needed for railway construction and for other public works. However, these trees did not form pure forests but often grew with other species such as oak, which were used as fuel, fodder, and small timber by the local people. See R. Guha and M. Gadgil, “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India,” Past and Present CXXIII (1989): 147.
Saldanha, “Colonialism and Professionalism,” 1268; Guha and Gadgil, “State Forestry,” 147; K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1) (January 1995): 18. This conversion of mixed forests to monocultures not only affected the forest ecology, but also ran counter to the survival needs of the local people.
R. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (Cambridge: White Horse, 1997); Weil, “Conservation.”
R. Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); H. Alavi et al., Capitalism and Colonial Production (London: Croom Helm, 1982).
B. Ribbentrop, Hints on Arboriculture in the Punjab; Intended for the Use of District and Forest Officers (Lahore: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1873), 73.
R. Guha, “Forestry in British and Post British India: An Historical Analysis,” Economic and Political Weekly XVII (1983): 1886; Weil, “Conservation.”
C. F. Amery, “Report on the Forests of India,” Transactions of the Scottish Arboricultural Society VIII (1876): 219–20.
Z. Smith, The Environmental Policy Paradox (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 40.
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© 2015 Pallavi V. Das
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Das, P.V. (2015). Railways’ Sleeper Demand and Deforestation. In: Colonialism, Development, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-49458-0_3
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