Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay

Front Cover
University of Washington Press, Dec 6, 2019 - History - 256 pages

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and migrants from it. Town planners, financiers, and property developers joined forces to secure the city as a space for commerce and encoded shelter types as legitimate or illegitimate. By the early twentieth century, the slum emerged as a particularly useful category of stigmatization that would animate city-making projects in subsequent decades.

Sheetal Chhabria locates the origins of Bombay’s now infamous “slum problem” in the broader histories of colonialism and capitalism. She not only challenges assumptions about colonial urbanization and cities in the global south, but also provides a new analytical approach to urban history. Making the Modern Slum shows how the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people–became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded.

 

Contents

Genealogies of the Urban Modern
3
Calculative Rationales
27
Localizing Agrarian Crises
56
Rendering Housing Technical
84
From Body to Milieu
113
A SelfGoverning City
141
Afterlives of City Making
179
Movements and Countermovements
185
Notes
197
Bibliography
213
Index
229
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay
Sheetal Chhabria
No preview available - 2019
Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay
Sheetal Chhabria
No preview available - 2019

Common terms and phrases

agrarian agriculture areas Banaji became BLCP Bombay City Bombay Improvement Trust Bombay Presidency Bombay’s building capitalists census Chandavarkar choultry City of Bombay city’s COBC COBITAR Colaba colonial Bombay Colonial City colonial India commercial company officials cost cotton created crises cultivators decades demand demarcated disease distinct dwellings East India Company economy effects Famine in India famished migrants forms Foucault Halalkhors Hazareesingh health officer housing density imperial increased Indian Famine industry inhabitants institutions intervention Island Kamathipura Konkan land logic Marathas MCRCOB meant measures ment merchants modern Mumbai municipal commissioner Municipal Corporation Nagpada native neighborhoods nineteenth century Parsi plague poor housing poor relief population ports power of capital practices problem production projects reform residents revenue Salsette Salsette Island Sandhurst sanitary credit sanitation scheme shelter slum social South Asia space spatial structures tactics tion town Trust’s unfree labor urban gaze villages workers

About the author (2019)

Sheetal Chhabria is associate professor of history at Connecticut College.

Bibliographic information

TitleMaking the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay
Global South Asia
AuthorSheetal Chhabria
ContributorsPadma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Anand A. Yang
Editionillustrated
PublisherUniversity of Washington Press, 2019
ISBN0295746297, 9780295746296
Length256 pages
Subjects ›  ›  › 

History / Asia / South / General
Social Science / Sociology / Urban
  
Export CitationBiBTeX EndNote RefMan