The making of Calcutta

More on Debjani Bhattacharyya: Rohan D'Souza recently reviewed her Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge UP, 2018) for H-Water. D'Souza writes:

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta announces a shift in gears within the bourgeoning and bustling field of the environmental histories of South Asia. Instead of taking the familiar route that revisits themes in the existing canon—forests, irrigation, and carnivore control—Debjani Bhattacharyya cuts an altogether fresh path by exploring how radical ecological change was critical to the making of urban colonial Calcutta (today’s Kolkata). The core claims in the book pivot on the many arduous British efforts from the late eighteenth century onward to transform Calcutta’s soggy marshy origins into landed concrete spaces—the firmed-up surfaces upon which were built residential, commercial, and industrial infrastructure and the basis for widespread financial speculation in real estate.

Whereas much of the detail on the drying out of British India’s premier colonial city can be found in a fairly voluminous documentation on drainage works, reclamation projects, and hydraulic engineering schemes, these admittedly technical accounts, we are cautioned, fail to meaningfully grasp the actual “secrets-of-land-making” (p. 1). transformation of “floating watery soils” into firm land, Bhattacharyya argues, was principally an ideological project that was profoundly underwritten by the notion of landed property, which, as a “legal technology” to “demarcate land, marsh, accretion and water,” actively triggered the clotting of Calcutta into urban soil (p. 23). Colonial landed property, moreover, by being set on a treadmill of economic valuation inevitably transmuted into the archetypal capitalist commodity: subject to the logics of the market and the relentless pursuit of profit. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as Calcutta in the early decades of the twentieth century began to explode into a crowded city—short on space, cramped with people, and lacking affordable housing—a thriving and ferocious urban land market burst forward. While Bhattacharyya does provide a riveting account of the aggressive jostling for land among an increasingly vocal working class, sundry lobbies of builders, extortionate landlords, the oscillating fates of rent speculators, and various interventions by municipal authorities, the discussion, however, is more pointedly aimed at returning us to the “secret.”

What finally emerged from the protracted confrontations over land scarcity, we are told, was a less advertised, if not entirely unstated, consensus among the various contending urban interests: that the outlying marshes and untidy swamps were “lands-in-waiting” rather than distinct hydrological phenomena (p. 172). This unanimous and determined call for cutting off the city from its “watery hinterlands,” in Bhattacharyya’s estimate, actually sought to mask a radical ecological rupture by which land and water were meant to be split into distinct and separable entities, instead of being acknowledged as ecologically entwined domains and integral to Bengal’s deltaic environments.

More at H-Water.

Guest Post: A Video Project about Austrian Law and Landscape

David Schorr recently invited me to share a few words about my latest video project with the readers of this blog. The video will be called “Wood, Water, Stone, Sky, Milk: Law and Landscape in Austria.” It will run about ninety minutes once it’s complete, but in the meantime I’ve been releasing short draft segments, one of which was cross-posted here a few weeks back.

The latest segment is called “Alexander and Iris Talk About Stone (without meeting),” and it explores an Austrian legal method beguilingly named after one of the most prominent elements of the Austrian landscape:

Both Alexander and Iris were great sports, and their enthusiasm for video as a medium enabled this segment to address a serious subject with a light touch and to reach viewers well outside university circles. That’s a tone and openness I’d like to achieve throughout the film.

The project grows out seven months I spent as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Salzburg in 2015, but its roots lie a bit further back. In 2012, I began an extended, unpaid leave of absence from Rutgers-Newark School of Law, where I had taught constitutional law and legal history for ten years. The reasons for the change were personal: my wife is a professor of English at Wesleyan University, and the burdens of my commute from New Haven came to outweigh the benefits of an academic career. We value our lives together.

The decision came with some significant material costs, but it has given me the time and freedom to strike out in new directions, and that’s been ever-inspiring. I had already published three books, and I wanted to jump well outside my comfort zone and explore modes of historical expression that were entirely new to me. I wanted to engage with radically different forms and styles of telling stories about the legal past. As it happened, two of the forms that came to interest me—two new directions I took—were visual.

The first new direction led me into the world of museum exhibitions. Most important, I began collaborating with my friend Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law School, on an exhibition for the Grolier Club in New York about illustrated law books. Called “Law’s Picture Books,” the exhibition will feature a number of works that are sure to interest readers of this blog, like this eighteenth-century book about Dutch water law, or this great edition of Bartolus. Do come join us when the exhibition opens in February 2018—it’s going to be exciting.

The second new direction led me into the world of video production and editing, which has become one of the most profound humanistic experiences of my life—it forced me to wrestle with basic questions about our knowledge of the world. I’ll find another occasion to reflect on the challenges involved when a university scholar tries to learn digital video from scratch. But I can say here that, to my relief, it struck me immediately that the storytelling foundations of documentary work and my own academic writing were basically the same. And, happily, after a couple of years of trial-and-error learning, I’ve become familiar enough with Adobe’s suite of post-production products—storytelling tools of jaw-dropping power for historians—to create work that’s significantly better than the first film I made on my Flip Video camera. Plus, the great thing about being a beginner again is there’s so much opportunity to learn so much more.

“Wood, Water, Stone, Sky, Milk”—or, when I’m feeling less ambitious, “Stone, Water, and Wood”—began as a very different video project. When I put together my Fulbright proposal, I intended to make a film about the Austrian legal philosopher Hans Kelsen and his pure theory of law. This seemed like a project just quixotic enough to be interesting to me. But after spending a series of afternoons meditating on Kelsen along the banks of the beautiful Salzach river, it became clear that any filmic treatment of Kelsen would after all have to be a film.  That is, it would require exploring his highly abstract thought in a way that would be grounded in—indeed, that would proceed from—worldly, visual metaphors. It also became clear that the project was too narrowly conceived.

Dirt lawyering and environmental history

(Adam Wolkoff's third post on teaching the history of law and the environment. Links to the rest of the posts are here.)

One of the hardest things about switching from the discipline of history to the study of law is learning how to slow down. Undergraduate and graduate history students read hundreds of pages a week, learning to analyze a monograph or article by figuring out its main arguments and reviewing its evidence to see if those claims hold up. They also become adept at synthesizing large bodies of historical literature to better situate the primary and secondary sources they read into those frameworks.

These skills should translate well into law school and to the categorical reasoning it purports to teach. But law school is not a BarBri cram course. Yes, students obsess over their outlines before final exams, trying to fit everything they’ve learned into a logical framework so they can be ready for the absurd fact patterns their professors throw at them. Yet an effective legal outline describes the relational quality of law, rather than a set of black letter certainties. Law students learn that every transaction presents a moment of legal possibility, in which the doctrine accepted as law in the past intersects with the understandings of the parties in the present and their beliefs about what a judge, jury, or the wider community might say in the future.

Contingency makes for compelling history, too, challenging the impulse of many writers and lecturers to produce deterministic narratives about the past. But it also fractures the story, producing histories that can deny the realities of structural power, or give too much authority to specific events or actors. Think about the history books that actually sell at Barnes & Noble: One (month or secretary of state or hockey goal) That Changed the World.

Undergraduate classes teaching law and environmental history can draw on this creative tension to give students new ways of seeing the nature and the built landscape. I’ve always related to the experience that William Cronon describes in his prologue to Nature’s Metropolis of growing up looking out the car window as the landscape shifted from the crowded, polluted, and artificial city to the bucolic countryside. “One of the pleasures of childhood and adolescence,” he writes, “is that one can experience emotions of this sort without worrying too much about their possible contradictions.” By giving students a grounding in the laws and practices underlying these landscapes, we not only dispel the illusory walls between urban and rural, nature and artifice, but help them understand the legal devices that define them.

It’s teaching the art of what real estate practitioners call “dirt lawyering,” helping students see

Air and ground rights
Marcel Breuer's proposed Grand Central tower (1968)
Breuer Papers (Smithsonian)

the principles underlying the landscape and the events that put those rules to the test. Nearly every class I teach seems to begin with drawing that square that property professors call Blackacre. It’s our platform for understanding what novel impositions people brought to the landscape in each era and how they contested them through formal and informal means. For the curious, it’s a skill that helps solve the mysteries of everyday life and its inequalities. “Why are there so many chemical companies and refineries in North Jersey?” my students asked. “Why are there no Whole Foods in Newark?” “Why don’t brownfields get cleaned up?” Even for those who never plan to be activists, teachers, or lawyers, “dirt lawyering” will be there whenever they sign a lease, build a fence, or look out their front windshield.

Constitution and environment in the graveyard of history

Where do constitutional history and environmental history meet? In cemeteries, it turns out.

(Environmental History)

Al Brophy recently posted "'These great and beautiful republics of the dead': Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery", in which he argues for the importance of cemeteries in American constitutional discourse. (This is not Brophy's first foray into environmental aspects of legal history; see his "Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law".)

Readers of Environmental History may remember Aaron Sachs's 2010 article, "American Arcadia: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Tradition", in which he explores the "flowering of a landscape tradition in the antebellum period that was characterized by a simultaneous engagement with mortality and with the immediate environmental context of ordinary life, by an ecological ethic based on humility, finitude, and integration". (See also Sachs's recently published Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (Yale UP, 2013).)

Interestingly, both articles highlight Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery (pictured here). Unfortunately, this seems to be yet another case where the disciplines of environmental history and legal history are talking past each other. Time for a dialogue!