THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF CANAL COLONIES: BRITISH AGRARIAN STRATEGIES IN MULTAN, PUNJAB

Abstract

The present paper examines the British canal colonization scheme in the Punjab in the political ecology, on the Multan region. It assumes that canal irrigation and land settlement schemes by British colonial government was a strategical instrument of agricultural development and also a strategy of ecological control and political domination. As the analysis indicates, the construction of canals was closely related to the imperial interests of spying, tax collecting, and social transformation. This is done through the integration of secondary literature, archival settlement reports and colonial era maps. The canal colonies transformed the dry plains of Multan into agricultural zones but this was done at the cost of environmental destruction and mass land alienation. The colonial state also re-allocated fertile land to other loyal communities, including ex-soldiers and upper-caste farmers, thereby creating new social hierarchies and disabilities of local communities. These interventions did not only reform land ownership but access to water and cropping patterns, and settlement patterns too, permanently reorganizing the agrarian ecology of the region. Placing the research into the context of the overall discussions in the postcolonial agrarian history and environmental governance, the article allows to understand the process of reordering the landscape by the imperial powers in order to gain their control. It raises to the fore the interrelation of environment, power and policy under colonial rule and the long-term effects of the colonization of canals in the agrarian economy of South Asia. The inquiry is mixed-method research that emphasizes the importance of historical political ecology in explaining current trends of inequality as based on colonial development programs.