The City in the Swamp

Aspects of the Site and Early Growth of Calcutta

Bibliographic Data

ID4613104
AuthorsRhoads Murphey (corresponding author)
Year1964
Volume130
Issue2
Pages241
Publication date1964-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7398 • E-ISSN: 1475-4959
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1794585
OpenAlexW2328689295
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Kipling's lines were written about Calcutta; they suited it well. Founded in 1690 on a small natural l vee thrown up by he Hooghly River, and set precariously on the edge of a deltaic swamp in a climate devastating to Europeans, Calcutta brought gold and death to many as the first city established in Asia on the modern Western commercial/urban model. Earlier European settlements such as at Surat, Goa, or Madras, were more nearly traditional trading factories and forts rather than fully developed urban bases of widespread commercial enterprise and investment. Situated with an eye to trade where it could best tap the great productivity of Bengal, Calcutta was indeed built by the river and founded its power in part on silt?the agricultural wealth of the Ganges delta. A 40-mile line of mills along the Hooghly, fed by deltagrown jute,l came in the nineteenth century to dominate the city's commercial/industrial structure. Silt was a chronic problem for shipping (see below), but the riverine gift of alluvium helped sustain the city with food and with earlier trade goods such as indigo. The dense network of waterways in Bengal, where virtually all settlement is riparian, made it possible to move these commodities to the city at low cost for export. Calcutta, like most of the port cities founded in Asia by Westerners, has always been primarily a service centre for export trade, a funnel for the collection and overseas distribution of commodities produced over a wide hinterland and financed and managed through commercial organizations in the city. Since about 1750, approxi? mately half of India's sea-borne trade has passed through Calcutta. The functions which the city performed were essentially new to India, as was to be the case with nearly all of the other Western-founded port cities in Asia which arose in the succeeding two centuries. Like most of them, Calcutta occupied a site which had received little or no attention from the indigenous inhabitants, one which maximized access to and from the sea ('Me the sea-captain loved*) and to and from those parts of the country which were actually or potentially productive of export goods. Port cities as such were rare in Asia before the advent of the Europeans; urban develop? ment was primarily inland, and European attention to the maritime fringes of each country after the fifteenth century was rewarded by the discovery of plentiful oppor? tunities for a commercially minded people to establish trade centres on their own models, responding to situational advantages for trade which had until then been largely neglected. One result was that the new port cities which arose, of which Calcu rta was the pioneer and prototype, were from the beginning alien, were dominated by Western traders as in effect outposts of the booming world of commercial/industrial Europe, and came in time to exert a revolutionary impact on the Asian host countries, an impact which extended far beyond the limits of economics. Kipling's mention of the sea-captain was appropriate. The most important tech? nical tool of the fifteenth century Renaissance in Europe was the new mastery of ships and sailing. Europe's command of the sea (commercial rather than naval) remained an important basis of its strength and prosperity into the present century, and ships

Archaeology · Biology · Environmental protection · Geography · Swamp · Ecology · Forestry · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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