Trickling and Pooling: The flow of hydro-capital in Bombay, 1860-1941

This paper examines the creation and consequences of inequities in accessing public water systems in Bombay during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While previous scholarship on the environment, water, and water management has considered the construction of dams and reservoirs, this piece focuses on the pipes distributing water and mediating access to municipal water systems. In positioning the pipes and people’s access at the centre of the story, this paper considers some of the social characterisations that shaped an inequitable and consequential urbanism in colonial port cities like Bombay. It argues that access to these new and expanding water systems created a new kind of capital, hydro-capital, that interacted with the markedly inequitable distribution of financial and social capital in colonial urban contexts. The question of who got these pipes and why yields insights into the intersections of race, caste, gender, religion, and class in the context colonial port cities and explores the consequences of the past to reframe our understanding of water poverty in the present. 

Image: An 1869 map of the water system of Bombay and its surrounds, British Library

Michael Sugarman is a Reserarch Associate at the University of Bristol’s Department of History. He earned MPhil and PhD degrees in history at the University of Cambridge where he became interested broadly in urbanism, the processes of urban development, and environmental history in the context of nineteenth and twentieth century port cities in South and Southeast Asia. He has written for the Global Urban History Blog and his work on urban history and urbanism has appeared in History Compass and Modern Asian Studies.