State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters

35 Pages·2008·6.09 MB·English

Indian Economic & Social
History Review
http://ier.sagepub.com
State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters
in colonial India: A preliminary exploration
Tirthankar Roy
Indian Economic Social History Review 2008; 45; 261
DOI: 10.1177/001946460804500204
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State, society and market in the aftermath
of natural disasters in colonial India:
A preliminary exploration
Tirthankar Roy
London School of Economics and Political Science
How did South Asian societies rebuild their economies following natural disasters? Based on
five episodes from colonial India, this article suggests that between the mid-nineteenth and
the mid-twentieth century, the response to disasters changed from laissez-faire to more state
intervention. Despite this change, post-disaster rebuilding was complicated by unspecified
rights to lost property, conflicting claims to property, asymmetric information between aid-
givers and receivers, conflicts between agencies, lack of cooperation between gainers and
losers, and in some of these examples, clashes between the colonial state and nationalist
organisations.
Introduction
All regions of the world are, to greater or lesser degrees, exposed to the threat of
acute and sudden environmental shocks, or natural disasters. Some are more ex-
posed than others. Closer home, windstorms, floods and earthquakes have been a
perennial part of life in South Asia, the outcome of such ‘permanent’ conditions
as Himalayan tectonics or the monsoon. Comparative historical data on disaster
mortality suggest a higher probability of death from natural disasters in South
Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this article was presented as the Annual Economic History
Lecture of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007. I wish to thank participants
and colleagues, especially Meghnad Desai, Janet Hunter, Colin Lewis, Patrick O’Brien, and Peter
Robb, for discussions and comments. Suggestions received from two anonymous referees led to
significant improvements. I also thank Frances Pritchett for permission to reprint two illustrations
from the collection displayed on her website.
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DOI: 10.1177/001946460804500204
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262 / TIRTHANKAR ROY
Asia than in the rest of the world (excluding China).1 It is predicted that climate
change will make storm surge and coastal flooding more likely in the region in
future. The interest of the article lies in the process of rebuilding that followed
such large natural disasters in colonial India. On what factors did the success or
failure of reconstruction depend? Does the past have useful lessons for rebuilding
in the future?
Acute collective stress—whether a dearth, a disaster or a civil disorder—offers
many themes that are potentially of interest to the historian. Every major natural
disaster destroys lives, livelihoods and assets. Lives lost cannot be restored, though
many more lives can be saved with timely relief and epidemic control measures.
Some livelihoods bounce back with surprising rapidity, partly because recovery
tends to be a labour-intensive process. It is lost assets that require the most carefully
planned response. The process of economic recovery depends largely on the success
of managed retrieval and reconstruction of assets.
Both the supply of relief or the attempt to save lives, and the process of rebuild-
ing or restoration of destroyed assets, need money, information, infrastructure
and coordination. Who supplies these resources, and how? The market can supply
them only to a certain extent. Demands of equity, and the need for information
and coordination make markets a weak agent in the rebuilding process. Can societal
cooperation supply these resources? Historians have at times noted the capacity
of calamities to forge fellow-feeling between peoples. This feature of natural
disasters like earthquakes, as opposed to man-made ones like war or civil strife,
derives from the fact that the former is more class neutral than the latter. In vulner-
able zones, the rich and the poor both suffer losses. Yet, if the intuitive expectation
that sympathies would overcome class barriers is perhaps true at the relief stage,
it tends to fail at the rebuilding stage. Just when cooperation is most needed, it
can break down as the restoration of assets begins. Since different people own
different kinds of assets, and because property rights are often unclear or disputed
to begin with, the rich and the poor disagree on plans, the state and civil society
come into conflict, and aid-givers blame each other. Disasters become complicated
events because they break up the basis for social cooperation due to a conflict of
economic interests.
The dual failure of markets and collectives demands that relief and rebuilding
be supplied by state agencies.2 State intervention in stress situations, however, is
complicated by the fact that disasters partially destroy public assets, and impair
the state’s capacity to respond. Furthermore, state intervention in times of stress
1 Disaster deaths, excluding famines and epidemics, accounted for 0.4 per 1,000 deaths in South
Asia between 1900 and 1999, 6.1 in China, and 0.2 in the rest of the world (based on EM-DAT
dataset, Asian Disaster Reduction Center, Data Book on Asian Natural Disasters in the 20th Century).
2 A more modern economic argument for state intervention builds on the fact that insurance markets
for low-frequency, high-impact risks tend to be incomplete (see the next section for a discussion).
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State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India / 263
is a rather modern idea, and one that has consistently entailed political conflicts.
These conflicts can be understood partly with reference to the event itself, and
partly with reference to the particular context of governance, that is, the nature,
capability, ideologies and ambitions of the state. How did the idea of a state-
managed response to disasters evolve in colonial India? How effective was the
state in the presence of market failure, collective action problems, and political
conflicts? This article is mainly interested in these two questions.
Although the article is primarily interested in Indian history, the questions
connect with a central theme in global environmental history. Historians of natural
disaster suggest that the response to disasters depends on the discourse on caus-
ation. If one takes a long-term view, the discourse on causation has shifted, from
a moral perspective to a rationalistic one, thus creating a ground for markets and
states to play a more active role in supplying relief and rebuilding, and also expos-
ing that role to greater scrutiny. Two hundred years ago, natural disasters tended
to be seen as divine punishment for sins committed by the communities suffering
the stress.3 Such beliefs did not necessarily mitigate the sense of shock or reduce
the demand for human intervention, let alone alleviating the effects, but did add a
moral, and at times cathartic, element to the response. As scientific research pro-
gressed on volcanic activity, atmospheric phenomena, or seismology, the social
meaning of catastrophic events changed. An increasingly dominant alternative
discourse emerged, wherein such events did not appear as a morality tale, but in-
stead as a risk external to the society.4 Acts of god tended to become acts of nature,
even though the two accounts lived together uneasily for a long time.5 The notion
that the effects of disasters could be controlled is a result of this change. In the
course of this change, societies exposed to sustained risk (of, say, a volcanic erup-
tion or a tidal wave) fashioned new strategies of preparedness—for example,
sending grown-up children away while their parents continued to propitiate the
spirits as before. Expansion in infrastructure and information systems meanwhile
increased the capacity of states to predict risks, supply relief and manage rebuilding,
while also increasing the potential losses to public assets from disasters. Urban-
isation, commercialisation, and the development of legal institutions strengthened
the capacity of markets to meet sudden shortages, while at the same time increasing
the potential for conflicts over property, and in some cases even the risks of damage.
In other words, as the natural environment became a technical-economic problem,
3 The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 famously became an occasion for a debate between continental
rationalism and theodicy. See Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake; and Dynes, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake
in 1755’. See also several essays in Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations.
4 Ted Steinberg, in his book Acts of God, argues that this change in attitude is associated with dimin-
ished ethical responsibility in the sphere of human action upon nature, making disasters more likely.
5 For a recent example, shortly before the Mount Merapi eruptions in May–June 2006, a volcan-
ologist rued, ‘the biggest problem the Indonesians face is getting the local people to believe what the
scientists say’; reported in the National Geographic Magazine, January 2008, p. 55.
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264 / TIRTHANKAR ROY
natural disasters turned into an occasion to forge new relationships between states,
markets and citizens.
The present article considers five episodes from colonial India in an attempt to
offer a stylised story about how these modern forms of interaction took shape. The
article limits itself to economic history. Being concerned with the role of markets
and states, it leaves out a whole range of other themes, for example, the ethical-
moral dimension, and a great deal of the social dimension as well. My sources,
furthermore, are limited. I do not wish to offer the limited empirical material here
as definitive histories of any one of these episodes. And yet, through a somewhat
confused patchwork, a pattern does seem to emerge that may have relevance to
future research on this subject.
The argument of the article has two parts. The first part comes as no surprise to
the Southasianist. In what might seem to be a timeless pattern, time made a signifi-
cant difference. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, the
response to disasters changed from laissez-faire to intervention. Following a pattern
that is reminiscent of the evolution of a famine relief policy, there is revealed, in
the examples studied here, a desire to develop the capacity, including the intel-
lectual capacity, to recover and rebuild better. Paradoxically, however, the effect-
iveness of state intervention depended on the broad compatibility between private
and social goals. Such compatibility depended on whether or not the state had
legitimacy. Therefore, contests over legitimacy could affect disaster response.
Effectiveness also depended on information and collaboration, the mechanisms of
which needed to be rebuilt after every disaster, and were often fashioned imper-
fectly. As we travel from 1864, the date of the Calcutta tidal wave, to 1935, the
year of the Quetta earthquake, we see the simultaneous unfolding of a more in-
trusive and capable state, and a more critical scrutiny of state action. Disasters,
thus, mirror the political-economic context.
The second part of the argument is perhaps less obvious. Beyond description,
the article is also interested in developing a stylised narrative of the economic
history of catastrophe. Towards meeting that goal, the article considers one of the
defining features of modern disasters to be a sudden, exogenous and unexpected
destruction of state capacity. From this starting point, it seems possible to generalise
a pattern of response consisting of three stages, an initial destruction of state cap-
acity, an activation of anarchic unregulated markets and private-order institutions
partly in reaction to the temporary retreat of the state, and an eventual rebound of
the state. I suggest further that the third stage saw intense contestation. The return
of the state was beset with collective action problems, and with political con-
flicts of a kind engendered by late colonialism.6 It is a constrained return of the
6 The collective action problem refers to a scenario where the formation of self-interested ‘coalitions’
becomes likely, and the basis for cooperation becomes weaker. The concept of coalition-based politics
and its potential economic consequences owes much to Olson, Logic of Collective Action.
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State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India / 265
state, and in the nature of these constraints we may discern change, progress, and
perhaps some regress too in the long run. This is a descriptive model, but it has
one virtue. It offers a common frame for the conflicts we see breaking out after
every episode from 1864 to 1935. That being said, it is important to note the limi-
tations of the model, imposed on it by its focus upon markets and states, and by
the nature of the sources used.
The narrative content of the article is limited by the scarcity of material available
on episodes in the nineteenth century, the short span of collective memory, and
the exploratory nature of the article. I start from 1864 because in the early nine-
teenth century, information channels on major disasters were extremely limited,
and seemingly confined to the mobile trading communities. Few reports from this
time were published. For example, information concerning the 1833 earthquake
in northern India was restricted to British trading posts. Information from Nepal
and Tibet was restricted, outside the Kathmandu Valley, to villages on merchant
routes from Kathmandu to Tibet and to India.7 The year 1864 did not necessarily
break this pattern, but did yield a great deal more documentation.
In general, the demand for and supply of information depended on a variety of
factors, such as the distance from the centre of administration and mass media,
which was overwhelmingly Calcutta in the nineteenth century, the political strength
of the affected population, the taxable capacity of the affected population, and the
interest and reach of the media. The sources on the 1864 tidal wave consist mainly
of reports sponsored by the shipping interests of Calcutta. On the other hand, the
main affected area, the delta south of Calcutta, saw no systematic survey, official
tour, or policy statement. By contrast, the 1876 tidal wave in Bengal generated
voluminous official correspondence, one commission of enquiry, and a personal
tour by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Richard Temple. At least one reason
for this interest was that, as far as the countryside was concerned, the affected
population in 1876 consisted of peasants, whereas in 1864 they had been fishermen.
The official interest did not seem to have mitigated the effects of the 1876 wave,
but the events were recorded more carefully. For example, the link between tidal
waves and cholera emerged as a point of discussion, and showed that a feasible
form of intervention was disease control. By the time of the twentieth-century
earthquakes, disasters were a governance problem, and saw the publication of a
7 Short notes published by the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, were among the few documents available
on the early nineteenth-century events. Legend has it that while the members of the Society (then the
Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal) sat down to conduct their annual meeting, the 1842 earthquake
struck their building. Reports published in the London media were also available sources. However,
such reports, based on recall and aimed at readers easily impressed, were very unreliable. For example,
a later reconstruction of a devastating conjunction of an earthquake, a hurricane and a tsunami in
southern Bengal in 1737 proved to be wildly imaginative and contradictory. See Bilham, ‘The 1737
Calcutta Earthquake and Cyclone’. The novelist Amitav Ghosh makes creative use of this storm in
The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans.
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series of official reports and press releases on relief and recovery. Legislative
proceedings of the time also contained discussions pertaining to the financing of
the rebuilding process. Further, several non-official channels became particularly
active. Reports were prepared by the press, the railways, the Darbhanga Raj after
the 1934 earthquake in Bihar, political volunteers, and scientists writing for the
Geological Survey of India. I use all of these sources.
What I do not use, with the partial exception of the 1876 wave, are unpublished
administrative documents on the Bihar or Bengal countryside. In principle, such
sources could add significant details, indeed whole new angles, on state-society
relationships. The signal limitation of official sources, though—and the point
applies to the material used here as well—is that they tend to overlook the political
processes that occur within communities. How relationships were reconstituted
between the rich and the poor, parents and children, men and women, how rural
communities came together or fell apart, are subjects of great importance, and
must constitute an important element of what I call rebuilding. What we require
in order to address issues such as these are the sufferers’ own narratives, which
remain weak, if not altogether missing, in the sources used here.8
The rest of the article has three sections. The next section develops a working
definition of natural disaster, demarcating at the same time a particular analytical
space for episodes so designated. The section includes a short survey of the global
literature that sees disasters as economic historical episodes. There are few, if any,
threads connecting the many disjointed scholarships. Given the fragmentary nature
of the literature, any attempt to use it in a straightforward way to organise the em-
pirical material would seem futile. That being said, there are themes within this
literature that help us rethink aspects of societal response to natural disasters
in India. The section thereafter presents the narrative material, and the last sec-
tion concludes.
Historiography
From an economic perspective, how do we historicise the response to natural
disasters? The answer should begin from a definition of natural disasters adapted
to the goals of this article. Definitions available from sociological or anthropo-
logical approaches tend to blur the distinction between episodes, which in ordinary
usage are called ‘disasters’, in an attempt to generalise the features of acute col-
lective stress.9 For example, Oliver-Smith defines disaster ‘as a process/event in-
volving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural
8 That said, sufferers’ narratives have a propensity to become morality tales, so that such evidence
needs to be used cautiously as sources in economic history.
9 Kiter Edwards, ‘An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Disasters and Stress’.
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State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India / 267
and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically
produced condition of vulnerability’.10 This definition is perhaps adequate when
the ‘victim’ is the main point of interest, but it is inadequate when economic re-
building and the politics of intervention are also of interest, for political economy
is sensitive to what and whose assets are lost.
I define natural disasters in this article as episodes that display four features.
First, a population faces a sudden elevated risk of losing lives, jobs and wealth.
Second, these risks tend to be distributed between individuals in a relatively class-
neutral way.11 Third, disasters involve interdependence between agents and events.
The last point means that those agencies potentially able to aid recovery—market,
state, civil society—are themselves affected by the event. In nearly all of the ex-
amples below, markets were strengthened and the state weakened (leaving the same
markets unregulated). And fourth, because natural disasters involve a mass destruc-
tion of private assets, they also involve a tortuous process of rebuilding assets.
This definition draws a helpful boundary between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’
disasters. Needless to say, there is no disaster that does not involve human agency
in making it worse, nor are there episodes of man-made stress that do not involve
precipitating external causes. The two terms are used in a purely comparative
sense, to distinguish between two types of stress that involve different qualities
of risk and response. South Asia has long been familiar with mass mortality due
to natural causes. Historical scholarship has dealt mainly with famines and dis-
eases.12 Famines, by the definition set out above, were a man-made and tidal
waves a natural disaster. Both types involved elevated risks of losing lives and
livelihoods. With famines, however, the risks rose gradually. Famines were slow
developing processes rather than sudden occurrences. During famines, the risks
were distributed unequally. The agents and instruments of relief remained at some
remove from the event. It was rarely the case in colonial India that government
officers died of hunger during famines. But tidal waves destroyed not only a part
of the society, but also a part of the administration.13 Unlike famines and epidemics,
10 ‘Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters’.
11 ‘... public calamity is a great leveller’, Maharaja of Darbhanga, quoted in Sinha, The Bihar
Earthquake and the Darbhanga Raj, p. 7; and ‘[s]udden onset [of] natural disasters ... are absolute ...
levellers’, Borland, ‘Capitalizing on Catastrophe’. The risk is that of initial impact. Current disaster
studies suggest plausibly that coping can still be class-biased; see O’Hare, ‘Hurricane 07B in the
Godavari Delta’, and Albala-Bertrand, The Political Economy of Large Natural Disasters.
12 Sen, ‘Ingredients of Famine Analysis’, and Poverty and Famines; Hall-Matthews, ‘The Historical
Roots of Famine Relief Paradigms’; Klein, ‘When the Rains Failed’; Dyson, ‘On the Demography of
South Asian Famines’; McAlpin, ‘Famines, Epidemics and Population Growth’ and ‘Dearth, Famine,
and Risk’; Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India’; Arnold, ‘Cholera and Coloni-
alism in British India’; and Watts, ‘British Development Policies and Malaria in India’.
13 Most industrial disasters, by this definition, are man-made. Industrial accidents share two features
with natural disasters, sudden onset and class-neutrality, but do not display the agent-event interaction
to quite the same extent.
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natural disasters impaired the means to cope by destroying roads, railways, hos-
pitals, communications, jails, banks, offices, and the lives of officers. Further,
famines did not destroy physical assets permanently, but earthquakes and tidal
waves did. For this reason, the recovery from famines could be remarkably quick,
whereas the rebuilding after an earthquake had to be a protracted affair.
On the other hand, in one respect famines and natural disasters seem to show a
common pattern of response. In both cases, the level of state intervention increased,
even though the ways in which it did differed considerably. In colonial India, fam-
ines and epidemics were problems that affected the indigenous population. The
state in the nineteenth century followed a broadly non-intrusive approach to
problems that could be identified with the social and cultural practices of the
indigenous population.14 That said, the general decline in mortality from the early
twentieth century indicated that two things had changed. First, the minimalist
position lost persuasive power after the late-nineteenth century Deccan famines.
Second, public goods and markets worked progressively better as a defence against
famines and epidemics. Such public goods included not only railways, sanitation,
or hospitals, but the institutionalisation of science and medical practice as well,
which contributed to the understanding of causation and prevention of disease.
Unlike famines, which affected the indigenous population, particularly the poor
among them, natural disasters affected both settlers and locals, the rich and the
poor. Therefore, while the state does reveal a detachment in the nineteenth century,
there was also reaction to such distance from powerful lobbies. In the nineteenth
century, state action in emergencies broadly took two forms. Revenue remission
was a standard response, in common with famine relief.15 The other action was
raising a subscribed fund. The history of state-aided charity goes back to the
times when the Company administration was socially not far apart from the prom-
inent commercial classes of Calcutta.16 In the examples studied here, these two
forms of response continued, but on an expanding scale. At the same time, dis-
satisfaction with mere charity grew as well. In the twentieth century, state agents
14 With famines, varying shades of Malthusianism created a bias for neutrality in the nineteenth
century; see Ambirajan, ‘Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy’; and Commander,
‘Malthus and the Theory of “Unequal Powers”’. Such a stance might account for the ‘inertia and re-
luctance’ to intervene in the cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century; see Arnold, ‘Cholera and Colo-
nialism’. In this context, if disease mortality did decrease, it was because natural immunity had perhaps
played a larger role than public policy intervention (see Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest’).
15 For one work specifically dealing with cyclones and flood damage, see Bhatta, The Natural
Disasters in Orissa in the 19th Century, pp. 56–57.
16 During a tidal wave in southeastern Bengal in June 1822, the Governor General held a public
meeting and collected Rs 1,000 mainly from Bengali notables, with which a boatload of 7,000 sacks
of rice (approximately 280 tons) was sent to the affected district. Report in the Bengali newspaper
Daya Prakash, 29 June 1822, reprinted in Bandopadhyay, ed., Sambadpatre Sekaler Katha [The
Past through Newspapers], p. 103.
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seemed to take a more active part in the coordination of rebuilding. I suggest that
this interventionism was shaped partly in reaction to the destruction of state cap-
acity in the initial stages of the event, and partly by the institutional problems that
rebuilding gave rise to. At the level of scientific understanding, there was a parallel
in the manner in which geologists and epidemiologists responded to disasters, by
developing partially testable theories of causation, which in turn led to a technology
of prediction, if not prevention.
Outside South Asian history, disaster studies that are potentially relevant to
the economic historian do not constitute one integrated framework. Global lit-
erature has dealt with themes as varied as collective insurance, political crises
and legitimacy, beliefs and rationality, and the response of the state, society and
markets to these events. A few key problems do emerge, however.
One set of issues deals with risks and insurance. Can preparedness account
for impact?
Economic historians have discussed two ways in which rural populations in
monsoon Asia prepared for famine risks, having larger families and storing grains.17
Preparedness, however, is of limited help in discussing natural disasters, for two
reasons. First, in order to have an insurance effect, disaster risk must be determinate.
If climatic risk is sometimes determinate, that of an earthquake is usually not.18
Second, insurance and preparedness depend on risk perception. Two mediating
factors enter this perception, preferences and bounded rationality. In a physical
sense, some regions are more vulnerable to coastal flooding than others. But com-
munities do often have a choice regarding living in safer areas. Why do communi-
ties choose to live in vulnerable areas? Risks may not be properly perceived because
the elevated probability of disaster occurrence often shows up only on a geological
time-scale. However, even when the probability of occurrence is determinate, for
example with monsoon storm surges, we still see a disregard of risk.19 Do genera-
tions systematically predict risks based on their own limited lifetime experience?
17 See Jones, The European Miracle; Pryor, ‘Climatic Fluctuations as a Cause of the Differential
Economic Growth’; and Anderson and Jones, ‘Natural Disasters and Historical Response’. The par-
ticular interest here is focused not on disaster impact, but on comparative economic growth. On grain
storage, see McAlpin, ‘Dearth, Famine, and Risk’.
18 For the same reason, disaster insurance is not a popular market product. Disasters are events
that have a small chance of occurring, but that inflict a very large damage when they do occur. Even
when the risk is known, it may be too small to justify the premium paid. See the discussion in Kunreuther,
‘The Changing Societal Consequences of Risks from Natural Hazards’. See also, on incomplete
markets, Skees and Barnett, ‘Conceptual and Practical Considerations for Sharing Catastrophic/
Systemic Risks’; and on an argument based on capital market imperfections, Froot, ‘The Market for
Catastrophe Risk’.
19 For example, Sagar Island on the mouth of the Hooghly in Bengal was swept clean of life by
giant waves in 1831 and 1876. Within a few years on each occasion, the island was repopulated. In
the contest between the memory of ruin and the pull of fertile land, the latter won.
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