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 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ier.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/2/261 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Indian Economic & Social History Review can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ier.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ier.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.in/about/permissions.asp Citations (this article cites 27 articles hosted on the SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms): http://ier.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/45/2/261 Downloaded from http://ier.sagepub.com at CNTR SCI AND ENVIRONMENT on October 7, 2008 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. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45, 2 (2008): 261–94 SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore DOI: 10.1177/001946460804500204 Downloaded from http://ier.sagepub.com at CNTR SCI AND ENVIRONMENT on October 7, 2008 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). The Indian EconomicDownloaded and from Social http://ier.sagepub.com History atReview CNTR SCI, AND45, ENVIRONMENT 2 (2008): on261–94 October 7, 2008 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