1 00:00:05,580 --> 00:00:12,960 We are discussing divergence here. And one of the great outcomes of the divergence debate in the last 15, 2 00:00:12,960 --> 00:00:28,560 20 years has been this outburst of evidence based historical research on the long term process of economic change in the non-Western world, 3 00:00:28,560 --> 00:00:37,350 partly in reaction to models of long term economic change, which derive the main evidence from Europe. 4 00:00:37,350 --> 00:00:42,840 But partly also and this is why they're coming from a belief that geography, 5 00:00:42,840 --> 00:00:51,570 which is a very local regional condition sometimes and the natural environment matters in shaping long term economic change. 6 00:00:51,570 --> 00:00:58,740 But we, while acknowledging that effect, haven't yet analysed it. 7 00:00:58,740 --> 00:01:11,700 One literature, which comes very close to that belief is and to which was looking at, has contributed a lot claims that factor endowments, 8 00:01:11,700 --> 00:01:19,950 especially natural resources developments shaped pathways of economic change not in a deterministic way. 9 00:01:19,950 --> 00:01:23,940 Pathways are flexible. They respond to trade, politics, technology. 10 00:01:23,940 --> 00:01:33,290 But to understand long term economic change, we have to understand that pathway and we have to understand the geographical influence. 11 00:01:33,290 --> 00:01:37,580 Current environmental discourse, especially the climate change discourse, 12 00:01:37,580 --> 00:01:50,090 alerts us also that just as geographies shape livelihoods and economic history, economic change also shapes geographies. 13 00:01:50,090 --> 00:01:54,560 So this work in progress is about this two way relationship, 14 00:01:54,560 --> 00:02:01,940 and it asks two questions How did geography in India shape economic history over a period of time? 15 00:02:01,940 --> 00:02:11,840 Which is my primary focus, and I'll explain soon why that period is interesting is important, but also how economic change impacts geography. 16 00:02:11,840 --> 00:02:14,150 Now what do I mean by geography? 17 00:02:14,150 --> 00:02:24,050 The dimension of geography that I would draw attention to, and which I think is very important to understand is the tropical monsoon climate. 18 00:02:24,050 --> 00:02:34,700 Let's see what that phrase really means. And what it means can be explained very simply by making a comparison between a tropical 19 00:02:34,700 --> 00:02:42,380 monsoon city with a temperate zone city on two points temperature and rainfall. 20 00:02:42,380 --> 00:02:52,220 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. 21 00:02:52,220 --> 00:02:58,220 We don't need a graph to tell that story, which is that Delhi is a hot place now. 22 00:02:58,220 --> 00:03:05,660 Behind that, however, there is an environmental and economic history message. 23 00:03:05,660 --> 00:03:13,160 Extreme heat of the kind that Delhi experiences every year dries up surface water, 24 00:03:13,160 --> 00:03:27,520 which is the cheapest to harvest and therefore makes harvesting water for use in agricultural use in the is extremely expensive. 25 00:03:27,520 --> 00:03:33,490 The significance of that statement can be described better with a mental experiment. 26 00:03:33,490 --> 00:03:37,570 London City, which draws 70 or more, 27 00:03:37,570 --> 00:03:49,480 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. 28 00:03:49,480 --> 00:03:56,680 Imagine that these reservoirs dry up all of them, not just as a one off natural disaster, 29 00:03:56,680 --> 00:04:02,500 which is in some sense easier to handle because you can import scarce water. 30 00:04:02,500 --> 00:04:09,070 But every year, year after year, if it is a condition of life that reservoirs dry up, then of course, 31 00:04:09,070 --> 00:04:14,800 Londoners and the people who run the city will have to adapt, and they can adapt in two ways. 32 00:04:14,800 --> 00:04:18,280 One is technology rely more on subsoil water. 33 00:04:18,280 --> 00:04:25,510 At the moment, the percentage of subsoil water is small because it is expensive to mine, but they can also adapt, 34 00:04:25,510 --> 00:04:35,140 and most people will do that in an institutional way, which is to try to take better control and private control of water sources. 35 00:04:35,140 --> 00:04:41,920 Water will then begin to turn from a public good or quasi public good into a private good, 36 00:04:41,920 --> 00:04:52,870 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. 37 00:04:52,870 --> 00:05:02,440 That's why the word monsoon comes in 80 percent South Asia, but India is not really an added zone. 38 00:05:02,440 --> 00:05:08,140 Aridity has a dictionary definition, which means absolute scarcity of water rainfall. 39 00:05:08,140 --> 00:05:21,940 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. 40 00:05:21,940 --> 00:05:26,890 This seasonality of water supply creates a set of phenomenon. 41 00:05:26,890 --> 00:05:41,380 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, 42 00:05:41,380 --> 00:05:50,320 economically productive season when the water constraint eases and that's very busy leaving the rest of the very slack. 43 00:05:50,320 --> 00:05:56,230 And these are all conditions that create rural poverty. 44 00:05:56,230 --> 00:06:00,910 So, of course, states know this condition. 45 00:06:00,910 --> 00:06:07,300 Any state in this region knows this condition, they have been living with it for a long time and any state which can, 46 00:06:07,300 --> 00:06:13,420 they will then try to respond to it by making water more easily accessible to the population, 47 00:06:13,420 --> 00:06:19,630 democratising access and make it a cheap, making it non-tribal, making it non-exclusive. 48 00:06:19,630 --> 00:06:23,920 Equally, you can think of, and I call that, increasing water access. 49 00:06:23,920 --> 00:06:32,320 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, 50 00:06:32,320 --> 00:06:38,380 but also also cultural barriers and how to do that. 51 00:06:38,380 --> 00:06:42,430 Barriers to access access a scenario by our control over the supply of water. 52 00:06:42,430 --> 00:06:55,780 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, 53 00:06:55,780 --> 00:07:07,540 something that you do not get if you rely on streams or ponds, which also dry up part of the. 54 00:07:07,540 --> 00:07:17,140 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, 55 00:07:17,140 --> 00:07:23,350 of course, if you keep democratising water access, some of this source is fixed. 56 00:07:23,350 --> 00:07:30,640 It depends on the regular process of recharge. The subsoil water is not, and in finite resource it will increase. 57 00:07:30,640 --> 00:07:35,680 It will deplete the resource or it will risk a depletion. 58 00:07:35,680 --> 00:07:41,080 This is something that the sustainability literature calls water stress. 59 00:07:41,080 --> 00:07:49,240 Their precise definition is the degree is the proportion of withdrawal of freshwater from renewable freshwater supply, 60 00:07:49,240 --> 00:07:53,890 which, as you can see in India, is very high. Water stress is very high. 61 00:07:53,890 --> 00:08:02,680 And but but in this study, I also use it in a more social scientific sense, 62 00:08:02,680 --> 00:08:13,800 which is that if you increase access and if you deplete resources, it will also cause political and other types of conflicts. 63 00:08:13,800 --> 00:08:19,350 The reason why water stress is such a politically charged issue in the 64 00:08:19,350 --> 00:08:25,200 sustainability literature is that South Asia is absolutely scarce in subsoil water, 65 00:08:25,200 --> 00:08:35,820 as far as we know. So the combination of these two is extremely worrying for the future. 66 00:08:35,820 --> 00:08:41,270 I can tell you what story I'm going to tell you very simply with this graph. 67 00:08:41,270 --> 00:08:44,060 This is what my study is about. 68 00:08:44,060 --> 00:08:52,070 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, 69 00:08:52,070 --> 00:09:00,530 politics became more democratic, the barriers to access as it has fallen. 70 00:09:00,530 --> 00:09:03,860 And at the same time, water stress has increased, 71 00:09:03,860 --> 00:09:11,660 and we are now living at a time when water access is fed or fairly widely a fairly wide, very democratic. 72 00:09:11,660 --> 00:09:20,930 But the stress is has gone to a to a some kind of limit and a simple illustration will use. 73 00:09:20,930 --> 00:09:25,340 The actual data will tell you that there is something in the story. 74 00:09:25,340 --> 00:09:32,120 I use the proportion of irrigated land over a period of more than 100 years and 75 00:09:32,120 --> 00:09:44,780 irrigation irrigated land is a proxy for proxy for fall in barriers to access. 76 00:09:44,780 --> 00:09:56,570 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. 77 00:09:56,570 --> 00:10:03,800 It's a quasi public good. And at the same time, per capita water availability has fallen very significantly. 78 00:10:03,800 --> 00:10:09,890 So that's the measure of water stress. That's my story. 79 00:10:09,890 --> 00:10:15,290 Now, I'm fully aware that this is kind of over generalised in so far. 80 00:10:15,290 --> 00:10:22,940 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. 81 00:10:22,940 --> 00:10:28,250 There are many geographical variations within it, and there's a big difference between the Gangetic basin, 82 00:10:28,250 --> 00:10:36,800 where surface water comes from the Himalayan rivers, which which do actually carry water throughout the year, and the dry, dry lands, 83 00:10:36,800 --> 00:10:43,400 semi-arid lands where the water surface water dries up much more quickly during summers. 84 00:10:43,400 --> 00:10:53,120 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, 85 00:10:53,120 --> 00:10:59,630 and the seaboard for a long time had its own livelihood pattern connected to trade. 86 00:10:59,630 --> 00:11:05,990 However, from the 19th century, and this is one reason why a start from that time these two worlds, the countryside, 87 00:11:05,990 --> 00:11:15,590 which is so water dependent at the seaboard, which is which has other other type of activities to rely on, began to come closer. 88 00:11:15,590 --> 00:11:22,910 They became interdependent because of this process that we just heard, which is this enormous expansion of commodity trade. 89 00:11:22,910 --> 00:11:29,780 Both worlds had a stake in the same thing. And that makes the story an integrated one. 90 00:11:29,780 --> 00:11:40,490 There are also many ideas which suggest that state's politics and institutional change were endogenous to this process, 91 00:11:40,490 --> 00:11:47,510 but I'm not going to deal with that now. Now, how new is all this? 92 00:11:47,510 --> 00:11:54,840 And I'm going to very briefly discuss five literatures which talk about land. 93 00:11:54,840 --> 00:12:02,010 And doesn't deal with this sometimes talk about what it as well, starting with development economics, 94 00:12:02,010 --> 00:12:10,020 which has been quite obsessed with transforming the countryside, 95 00:12:10,020 --> 00:12:22,200 making land more democratically available, making access to land more democratic and and obsessed with land reforms as the 96 00:12:22,200 --> 00:12:27,940 method by which you create most welfare and economic growth in the countryside. 97 00:12:27,940 --> 00:12:33,150 Now, if you go back to that literature, which was very big in the 1970s and 80s, 98 00:12:33,150 --> 00:12:38,010 and with this knowledge that tropical monsoon is a water that is a problem 99 00:12:38,010 --> 00:12:43,590 of water will be struck by how little water is discussed in this literature. 100 00:12:43,590 --> 00:12:49,950 There is an obsession, there's a fixation with land and almost no mention of water. 101 00:12:49,950 --> 00:12:57,870 And that is not really surprising at some level, because the people I cite here really learnt that economics from Britain. 102 00:12:57,870 --> 00:13:03,100 And if David Ricardo doesn't mention water, they're not going to. 103 00:13:03,100 --> 00:13:11,850 So but there is a there is a bias there, but there is also an insight. 104 00:13:11,850 --> 00:13:19,410 And the insight is that secure property, right, creates the incentive to work an asset more productively. 105 00:13:19,410 --> 00:13:28,080 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, 106 00:13:28,080 --> 00:13:34,980 then it solves both distribution and economic growth at the same time because these people work much harder. 107 00:13:34,980 --> 00:13:42,060 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. 108 00:13:42,060 --> 00:13:50,910 Now, unlike unlike economics, classical Indian thinking about statecraft has not been so myopic. 109 00:13:50,910 --> 00:14:02,010 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. 110 00:14:02,010 --> 00:14:08,220 OK. The minister tells the King that I had coloured eyes. 111 00:14:08,220 --> 00:14:15,210 It's a good thing, but mind water, just just taking over a big chunk of life doesn't mean anything. 112 00:14:15,210 --> 00:14:23,190 But that is also another dimension to this advice on statecraft, which is connected to cost and connected to hierarchy, 113 00:14:23,190 --> 00:14:33,330 and the idea that access the idea that water is one of those goods that you do not share with other people widely. 114 00:14:33,330 --> 00:14:39,030 And that then extends to a kind of moral principle about the source of water. 115 00:14:39,030 --> 00:14:44,130 If you are older, will you do not share it with outsiders? 116 00:14:44,130 --> 00:14:50,610 And if you do that, then you not only are depleting something that is very valuable, 117 00:14:50,610 --> 00:14:55,380 but much more than that you are doing something against your religion. 118 00:14:55,380 --> 00:15:03,360 And that idea is an extremely powerful one. And if you read the leader's writings, the oppressed caste writings, 119 00:15:03,360 --> 00:15:10,440 you see that the remarkable persistence of that idea into the modern times this is a literature. 120 00:15:10,440 --> 00:15:18,390 Marx brought a wit. Fogell is something we are familiar with because there's a big thinking on global history, 121 00:15:18,390 --> 00:15:30,720 which sometimes stops about water at any rate with Fogel and not all too understood that tropical societies need to solve a different problem. 122 00:15:30,720 --> 00:15:34,530 And that creates a certain kind of effects. 123 00:15:34,530 --> 00:15:43,170 However, when you go deeper into this literature, you realise that they're not really doing either environmental history or economic history. 124 00:15:43,170 --> 00:15:49,530 They are trying to understand it. They're trying to create the image of a state that is extremely powerful. 125 00:15:49,530 --> 00:15:56,790 That doesn't change, and therefore the societies don't change. That's what they're ultimately interested in producing. 126 00:15:56,790 --> 00:16:01,510 And that idea has been discarded, but it's also peculiarly unsuitable. 127 00:16:01,510 --> 00:16:08,010 What I'm doing because I am in fact interested in change in environmental history 128 00:16:08,010 --> 00:16:13,890 and especially the post-colonial environmental history that is not a lot on water, 129 00:16:13,890 --> 00:16:19,290 but certainly a lot on the environment. But when you read through that literature, 130 00:16:19,290 --> 00:16:28,500 you'll begin to believe that it began to see that that's also not quite suitable to a purpose like this one. 131 00:16:28,500 --> 00:16:32,370 Much of post-colonial environmental history carries the assumption that there was a 132 00:16:32,370 --> 00:16:38,820 big watershed in the history of the tropical environment when the Empire came in, 133 00:16:38,820 --> 00:16:43,590 when they consolidated their power and then joined globalising forces. 134 00:16:43,590 --> 00:16:48,180 Now, if that's the story you are going to tell, it carries, 135 00:16:48,180 --> 00:16:54,350 it smuggles in an implicit assumption that before all of that happened, there was some kind of. 136 00:16:54,350 --> 00:17:04,310 The equilibrium in place, some kind of harmony in place, the statement from Robert Holmes reflects that sentiment. 137 00:17:04,310 --> 00:17:11,880 When you consider what there was no such harmony. It was an extremely it was a brutally unequal society. 138 00:17:11,880 --> 00:17:23,940 Based on water access, unequal water access, famines happened, and Andrew, cultural expansion was always stressful, always expensive. 139 00:17:23,940 --> 00:17:32,610 Contemporary sustainability literature actually is much more mindful of the importance of water for tropical societies for India, 140 00:17:32,610 --> 00:17:41,910 but they really explore the second of the two questions that I started with that about how geography, how economic change, shaping geography. 141 00:17:41,910 --> 00:17:46,080 A lot about how geography shapes economic history. 142 00:17:46,080 --> 00:17:52,470 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. 143 00:17:52,470 --> 00:18:02,160 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. 144 00:18:02,160 --> 00:18:10,200 Not in a steady way, but step by step making intensive agriculture possible, making organisation possible. 145 00:18:10,200 --> 00:18:14,880 And the third part will say, will show how it raised a lot of stress. 146 00:18:14,880 --> 00:18:18,990 What were the processes that raised what of stress? 147 00:18:18,990 --> 00:18:30,540 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. 148 00:18:30,540 --> 00:18:37,710 So this summary the balance between water access and water stress was unstable at any time, anywhere in South Asia. 149 00:18:37,710 --> 00:18:42,360 That is geography. It's not a post-colonial pre-colonial thing. 150 00:18:42,360 --> 00:18:50,430 ActionScript nevertheless happened in mid-19th century onward, which is steady fall in the coastal axis, 151 00:18:50,430 --> 00:19:00,170 enormous growth in food production, which wouldn't happen without this and causing irreversible water stress. 152 00:19:00,170 --> 00:19:09,650 The trade off between what access and what, what Australia's drew politics and law to mediate between people and water. 153 00:19:09,650 --> 00:19:21,470 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. 154 00:19:21,470 --> 00:19:30,320 We are living through a very intensely passionate environmental discourse, which centres around climate change, and much of it is framed. 155 00:19:30,320 --> 00:19:37,970 At least the popular media discourse is framed within a moral language which blames somebody, 156 00:19:37,970 --> 00:19:42,980 whether it's the world genetic world leader or the president of the United States. 157 00:19:42,980 --> 00:19:48,890 But when you look at water, you realise that that moral framing doesn't work. 158 00:19:48,890 --> 00:19:55,340 In fact, if anything, the moral framework works in in totally reverse way. 159 00:19:55,340 --> 00:20:04,400 In some sense, the water. The increasing water stress is a result of a very successful welfare is development of 160 00:20:04,400 --> 00:20:10,730 democratisation process that the tropical world has seen water stress as a result of that. 161 00:20:10,730 --> 00:20:21,680 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.