We are discussing divergence here. And one of the great outcomes of the divergence debate in the last 15,
20 years has been this outburst of evidence based historical research on the long term process of economic change in the non-Western world,
partly in reaction to models of long term economic change, which derive the main evidence from Europe.
But partly also and this is why they're coming from a belief that geography,
which is a very local regional condition sometimes and the natural environment matters in shaping long term economic change.
But we, while acknowledging that effect, haven't yet analysed it.
One literature, which comes very close to that belief is and to which was looking at, has contributed a lot claims that factor endowments,
especially natural resources developments shaped pathways of economic change not in a deterministic way.
Pathways are flexible. They respond to trade, politics, technology.
But to understand long term economic change, we have to understand that pathway and we have to understand the geographical influence.
Current environmental discourse, especially the climate change discourse,
alerts us also that just as geographies shape livelihoods and economic history, economic change also shapes geographies.
So this work in progress is about this two way relationship,
and it asks two questions How did geography in India shape economic history over a period of time?
Which is my primary focus, and I'll explain soon why that period is interesting is important, but also how economic change impacts geography.
Now what do I mean by geography?
The dimension of geography that I would draw attention to, and which I think is very important to understand is the tropical monsoon climate.
Let's see what that phrase really means. And what it means can be explained very simply by making a comparison between a tropical
monsoon city with a temperate zone city on two points temperature and rainfall.
The graph on the left gives you the maximum monthly temperature, and it tells you a story at the simplest level, which all we all know.
We don't need a graph to tell that story, which is that Delhi is a hot place now.
Behind that, however, there is an environmental and economic history message.
Extreme heat of the kind that Delhi experiences every year dries up surface water,
which is the cheapest to harvest and therefore makes harvesting water for use in agricultural use in the is extremely expensive.
The significance of that statement can be described better with a mental experiment.
London City, which draws 70 or more,
70 percent or more of its needs of water from a set of manmade lakes is very dependent on the result via a system trapping rainwater.
Imagine that these reservoirs dry up all of them, not just as a one off natural disaster,
which is in some sense easier to handle because you can import scarce water.
But every year, year after year, if it is a condition of life that reservoirs dry up, then of course,
Londoners and the people who run the city will have to adapt, and they can adapt in two ways.
One is technology rely more on subsoil water.
At the moment, the percentage of subsoil water is small because it is expensive to mine, but they can also adapt,
and most people will do that in an institutional way, which is to try to take better control and private control of water sources.
Water will then begin to turn from a public good or quasi public good into a private good,
and that is the thought that I'm going to come back to in a moment, and I would want you to keep that in mind when you look at rainfall.
That's why the word monsoon comes in 80 percent South Asia, but India is not really an added zone.
Aridity has a dictionary definition, which means absolute scarcity of water rainfall.
It's not absolutely scarce, but much of the rainfall occurs in a three month window, leaving the rest of the year extremely dry and hot.
This seasonality of water supply creates a set of phenomenon.
One of them, of course, is high famine risk, but also high degrees of idleness labour supplies because it is expensive to mine water and a very short,
economically productive season when the water constraint eases and that's very busy leaving the rest of the very slack.
And these are all conditions that create rural poverty.
So, of course, states know this condition.
Any state in this region knows this condition, they have been living with it for a long time and any state which can,
they will then try to respond to it by making water more easily accessible to the population,
democratising access and make it a cheap, making it non-tribal, making it non-exclusive.
Equally, you can think of, and I call that, increasing water access.
That's a historical process. Equally, you can think of barriers to access not only technological barriers because it's expensive to do all this,
but also also cultural barriers and how to do that.
Barriers to access access a scenario by our control over the supply of water.
The what the control level means something like a well, which gives you a more a degree of control over a kind of insurance against the dry season,
something that you do not get if you rely on streams or ponds, which also dry up part of the.
And so what our access is one element in the history that I will describe that is a second element if you keep doing this,
of course, if you keep democratising water access, some of this source is fixed.
It depends on the regular process of recharge. The subsoil water is not, and in finite resource it will increase.
It will deplete the resource or it will risk a depletion.
This is something that the sustainability literature calls water stress.
Their precise definition is the degree is the proportion of withdrawal of freshwater from renewable freshwater supply,
which, as you can see in India, is very high. Water stress is very high.
And but but in this study, I also use it in a more social scientific sense,
which is that if you increase access and if you deplete resources, it will also cause political and other types of conflicts.
The reason why water stress is such a politically charged issue in the
sustainability literature is that South Asia is absolutely scarce in subsoil water,
as far as we know. So the combination of these two is extremely worrying for the future.
I can tell you what story I'm going to tell you very simply with this graph.
This is what my study is about.
It's a work in progress, but I can tell you the message, which is that over a period of time when the technology of water access improved,
politics became more democratic, the barriers to access as it has fallen.
And at the same time, water stress has increased,
and we are now living at a time when water access is fed or fairly widely a fairly wide, very democratic.
But the stress is has gone to a to a some kind of limit and a simple illustration will use.
The actual data will tell you that there is something in the story.
I use the proportion of irrigated land over a period of more than 100 years and
irrigation irrigated land is a proxy for proxy for fall in barriers to access.
And that is that the reason being that much of this irrigated land is canal water recycling river water, and that is not a private good.
It's a quasi public good. And at the same time, per capita water availability has fallen very significantly.
So that's the measure of water stress. That's my story.
Now, I'm fully aware that this is kind of over generalised in so far.
And part of that story, part of the story, the telling of the story will involve suggesting that India is not one kind of unique.
There are many geographical variations within it, and there's a big difference between the Gangetic basin,
where surface water comes from the Himalayan rivers, which which do actually carry water throughout the year, and the dry, dry lands,
semi-arid lands where the water surface water dries up much more quickly during summers.
There is also a big exception, which is the seawater, which doesn't really suffer from this problem as much as the interior the countryside does,
and the seaboard for a long time had its own livelihood pattern connected to trade.
However, from the 19th century, and this is one reason why a start from that time these two worlds, the countryside,
which is so water dependent at the seaboard, which is which has other other type of activities to rely on, began to come closer.
They became interdependent because of this process that we just heard, which is this enormous expansion of commodity trade.
Both worlds had a stake in the same thing. And that makes the story an integrated one.
There are also many ideas which suggest that state's politics and institutional change were endogenous to this process,
but I'm not going to deal with that now. Now, how new is all this?
And I'm going to very briefly discuss five literatures which talk about land.
And doesn't deal with this sometimes talk about what it as well, starting with development economics,
which has been quite obsessed with transforming the countryside,
making land more democratically available, making access to land more democratic and and obsessed with land reforms as the
method by which you create most welfare and economic growth in the countryside.
Now, if you go back to that literature, which was very big in the 1970s and 80s,
and with this knowledge that tropical monsoon is a water that is a problem
of water will be struck by how little water is discussed in this literature.
There is an obsession, there's a fixation with land and almost no mention of water.
And that is not really surprising at some level, because the people I cite here really learnt that economics from Britain.
And if David Ricardo doesn't mention water, they're not going to.
So but there is a there is a bias there, but there is also an insight.
And the insight is that secure property, right, creates the incentive to work an asset more productively.
If that was the basic idea behind land reform, if you redistribute land, if you strengthen property, the private property of the poor people on land,
then it solves both distribution and economic growth at the same time because these people work much harder.
That could apply to water as well. It's a it's a it's a it could be an argument for a water reform if you like.
Now, unlike unlike economics, classical Indian thinking about statecraft has not been so myopic.
You have over millennia. You have many sources which talk about what the Kings should do and which are which display a constant anxiety disorder.
OK. The minister tells the King that I had coloured eyes.
It's a good thing, but mind water, just just taking over a big chunk of life doesn't mean anything.
But that is also another dimension to this advice on statecraft, which is connected to cost and connected to hierarchy,
and the idea that access the idea that water is one of those goods that you do not share with other people widely.
And that then extends to a kind of moral principle about the source of water.
If you are older, will you do not share it with outsiders?
And if you do that, then you not only are depleting something that is very valuable,
but much more than that you are doing something against your religion.
And that idea is an extremely powerful one. And if you read the leader's writings, the oppressed caste writings,
you see that the remarkable persistence of that idea into the modern times this is a literature.
Marx brought a wit. Fogell is something we are familiar with because there's a big thinking on global history,
which sometimes stops about water at any rate with Fogel and not all too understood that tropical societies need to solve a different problem.
And that creates a certain kind of effects.
However, when you go deeper into this literature, you realise that they're not really doing either environmental history or economic history.
They are trying to understand it. They're trying to create the image of a state that is extremely powerful.
That doesn't change, and therefore the societies don't change. That's what they're ultimately interested in producing.
And that idea has been discarded, but it's also peculiarly unsuitable.
What I'm doing because I am in fact interested in change in environmental history
and especially the post-colonial environmental history that is not a lot on water,
but certainly a lot on the environment. But when you read through that literature,
you'll begin to believe that it began to see that that's also not quite suitable to a purpose like this one.
Much of post-colonial environmental history carries the assumption that there was a
big watershed in the history of the tropical environment when the Empire came in,
when they consolidated their power and then joined globalising forces.
Now, if that's the story you are going to tell, it carries,
it smuggles in an implicit assumption that before all of that happened, there was some kind of.
The equilibrium in place, some kind of harmony in place, the statement from Robert Holmes reflects that sentiment.
When you consider what there was no such harmony. It was an extremely it was a brutally unequal society.
Based on water access, unequal water access, famines happened, and Andrew, cultural expansion was always stressful, always expensive.
Contemporary sustainability literature actually is much more mindful of the importance of water for tropical societies for India,
but they really explore the second of the two questions that I started with that about how geography, how economic change, shaping geography.
A lot about how geography shapes economic history.
The rest of the project can be explained very simply, and I'm not going to take any time in doing it because it's a work in progress.
There are three parts to it. The first part was that if access was costly before that, the barriers to access did fall after 1850.
Not in a steady way, but step by step making intensive agriculture possible, making organisation possible.
And the third part will say, will show how it raised a lot of stress.
What were the processes that raised what of stress?
I can discuss some of these the detailed designs made written in smaller, font inspired, but I wanted to really spend more time on this.
So this summary the balance between water access and water stress was unstable at any time, anywhere in South Asia.
That is geography. It's not a post-colonial pre-colonial thing.
ActionScript nevertheless happened in mid-19th century onward, which is steady fall in the coastal axis,
enormous growth in food production, which wouldn't happen without this and causing irreversible water stress.
The trade off between what access and what, what Australia's drew politics and law to mediate between people and water.
Let me end with the statement, which is a very frightening one, but also a message, a kind of political message that we can draw from this.
We are living through a very intensely passionate environmental discourse, which centres around climate change, and much of it is framed.
At least the popular media discourse is framed within a moral language which blames somebody,
whether it's the world genetic world leader or the president of the United States.
But when you look at water, you realise that that moral framing doesn't work.
In fact, if anything, the moral framework works in in totally reverse way.
In some sense, the water. The increasing water stress is a result of a very successful welfare is development of
democratisation process that the tropical world has seen water stress as a result of that.
Where do we go from there? I'm not sure, and I think that's a very tricky area to enter, but it's not there that.