British misreading of Bengal’s feudal irrigation canals caused a two-century ecological collapse

Evidence

In the eighteenth century when the British came into the area of Bengal that is now Bangladesh, they encountered fully developed “ancient waterworks.” They were in fact very complicated irrigation canals so that the flood area could be managed. What they encountered was a feudal system there. The feudal chiefs actually made their serfs, their subordinates—I am using the European words—manage the canals and keep them up. When the British came in those feudal heads became tax collectors for the British, and they did not then do anything to keep up the canals; the feudal chiefs turned tax collectors did not provide their own subordinates, and no kind of servant of the East India Company was employed to keep up those irrigation canals. The British did not understand that they were irrigation canals for flood-management. What they thought they were I don’t know, maybe waterways for transport or whatever. The canals soon became stagnant, infested with mosquitoes, and so they started to destroy these canals. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2300

Categorization

• CANDY: The fact that colonial tax collectors stopped clearing irrigation canals—which the British then misread and destroyed—is a compact, self-contained story with a sharp irony worth telling.
• SHARE: For a historian of colonial infrastructure or ecological history: the detail that a 1930s empire waterworks inspector’s report is the reconstruction source.
• XREF: connects to: Construction of dams was actually destruction of ecosystems

Broader Connections

• Construction of dams was actually destruction of ecosystems #corroborates (0.78)