05-20-2005, 03:46 AM
KEEPERS OF THE JUNGLE: ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT IN BRITISH INDIA, 1855-1900.
by GREGORY BARTON
Nearly 20 years before the first national park, Yellowstone, was established in the United States in 1872, British colonial authorities in India already had begun a program to acquire and set aside vast tracts of forest lands for environmental preservation. On 3 August 1855, Lord Dalhousie, the governor general of India, reversed previous laissez-faire policy to establish the India Forest Department and annex large areas of sparsely populated lands in India. These lands were declared protected areas and staffed by foresters, fireguards, rangers, and administrators. Over the next decades, forestry in India became an international profession with global specialists ruling an empire of trees and grasslands.(1)
The development of environmental practice in India depended upon a general Victorian decline of the entrepreneurial ideal that allowed private parties to exploit resources for immediate gain without regard for the future, and a concurrent shift toward state intervention. Spurred by the "utilitarian" philosophy of English political theorist Jeremy Bentham, who privileged the common social good over indiscriminate individualism, appeals were made to reform the new industrial cities and impose new sanitation, police, education, and work standards. These reforms marked a new degree of state intervention hitherto unknown in liberal Victorian society. Against this shift from Adam Smith individualism to Benthamite collectivism emerged new environmental interventions--paternalistic, radical, and previously untried, first in British India, then the other British colonies and the United States.(2)
The new environmental policies served in turn to support British imperialism in India. Unlike the conservative French and English royal forests reserved for hunting by the privileged elite, or the later American concept of total protection in national parks, the new colonial environmentalism was intended to generate income for the imperial British state through strict control of India's natural resources. Lord Dalhousie's new forest policies greatly expanded British authority over the land and people of India, a colonial empire that the British had procured piecemeal over the course of several centuries of mercantile and military exploitation. Thus, environmentalism and imperialism have a shared past, and the newly protected forests marked a symbiotic alliance of environmental concern with expansion of state power in India.
As Thomas Richards points out in The Imperial Archive, the drive for knowledge and the penchant to divide and catalogue the world--central to the environmental project--grew from taking stock of the "inventory" of imperialism.(3) Part of that inventory was the discovery, subjection, demarcation, and effective management of nature. British officers in India had been surveying and mapping the subcontinent since the late eighteenth century, a difficult and often dangerous task. Prominent among nineteenth-century surveyors were such recognizable names as that of George Everest.(4)
India held a particular allure for civil and government specialists throughout the nineteenth century. The subcontinent, with its vast forests, savannas, and grasslands studded with exotic animals and fauna, beckoned to young British graduates who saw not a wild waste of jungle and savanna but a frontier of new knowledge, adventure, and discovery. British investment in India's economy and infrastructure increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Administrators hired specialists in botany or forestry from a number of European countries, particularly Germans such as Berthold Ribbentrop, who was inspector-general of forests in India from 1888 to 1900.(5)
Paradoxically, not only India's bounty but its critical lack of resources attracted European interest. For example, while India at first easily supplied "sleepers," the railroad ties for British-built tracks that crisscrossed the subcontinent, and firewood to power the steam-driven locomotives, a critical shortage had developed by the 1840s. As the British garnered more territory, demand on the forests for wood increased. Larger populations led to more intensive local burning and grazing, and the demand for firewood skyrocketed in burgeoning villages that competed with tracks and steam engines for local resources. Dwindling supplies of English oak at home, combined with newly available rail access between the interior where wood was harvested and the ports where it was shipped abroad, expanded the export market for Malabar teak, used by the British navy. A rising market for exotic woods like aromatic sandalwood placed an added strain on the supplies of timber in accessible areas. All of these demands on the timber supply added up to a critical shortage by the time Lord Dalhousie took office.(6)
In addition, India's forest administrators feared the potential long-term environmental effects of deforestation caused by indiscriminate logging. Contemporary climate theorists warned that the destruction of forests by man's artificial interference eventually would affect cycles of rain and evaporation, resulting in vast desert areas and the potential ruin of civilization if deforestation continued.(7) J. D. Hooker, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, alerted Dalhousie to the potential economic and climatic effects of deforestation and, along with the extensive writings of surgeon Edward Green Balfour on Indian forest issues, convinced Dalhousie to support modern scientific forestry methods and conservation.(8)
Previous attempts at conservation in India had failed for lack of political support. As early as 1805, the British government requested the British East India Company, which already controlled large parts of the coastal regions, to investigate the feasibility of harvesting Malabar teak in Madras to meet the needs of British shipbuilding during the Napoleonic war. Although the East India Company was a private trading company commissioned in 1600, in India it functioned as a state entity, enjoying a monopoly of trade in the areas it ruled. Acting at the direction of the British parliament, it shared authority in India with government officials. The company appointed a former police officer, Captain Watson, as India's first conservator of forests in 1806. Watson's two-pronged plan involved placing a tax on teak in order to simultaneously slow its harvest by private interests and raise money for the government, and then purchasing the teak from the private dealers. Together, these measures would guard against over-exploitation and ensure a steady supply of teak.(9)
After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, however, the navy had less need of teak, and a new governor of Madras, Thomas Munro, felt that the timber royalty unnecessarily raised the opposition of Indian princes who objected to the tax placed on forests under their authority. Munro also felt pressure from Indian merchants who objected strenuously to a tax that cut severely into their profits and from peasants who saw traditional access to the forest sharply curtailed. The new governor rescinded the teak regulations, abolished Captain Watson's position, and allowed the free market to operate as it had before.(10)
Lord Dalhousie's tenure as governor-general from 1848 to 1856 saw the acquisition of territory and implementation of administrative reforms for which posterity dubbed Dalhousie "the great Proconsul." As G. M. Young has noted, he was a curious combination of the "Tory gentleman and the scientific Benthamite administrator"(11)
Like many government officials, Dalhousie held several posts concurrently. As a member of the Board of Trade, he helped regulate the British railways in India. Intervention in local affairs held no ideological complications for Dalhousie, and he saw anything upon which "the whole machinery of society will be stimulated" as fair game.(12) Thus he encouraged state ownership and regulation of railways and established a publicly guaranteed stock company to construct railroads. Subsequent administrations carried on his vision for complete nationalization of the rails.(13)
Dalhousie's support for conservation was unapologetically imperialist. Upon reaching the capital at Calcutta for his inauguration in 1848, he proclaimed that "we are Lords Paramount of India, and our policy is to acquire as direct a dominion over the territories in possession of the native princes, as we already hold over the other half of India."(14) Under his administration, Crown and Company annexed eight states: the Punjab, Pegu, Satara, Samalpur, Jhansi, Nagpur, Berar, and Oudh, making their rulers vassals to the British Empire.
Dalhousie's annexation of the Punjab region of northwestern India, then ruled by a young Sikh maharaja, was typical of the way he extended British control. In a letter to a parliamentary committee in 1849, Dalhousie argued that the Sikh government there had violated the 1846 treaties of Lahore and Bhyrowal by defaulting on a debt owed the British government. He also charged that the Sikhs instigated unending hostilities toward Britain--a situation exacerbated by the minority of the young maharaja who could not control his subjects.(15) The Punjab was rich in unexploited timber resources, and its hilly forested terrain had been eyed by the British well before Dalhousie. Lord Ellenborough, governor general from 1842-44, predicted in his correspondence with the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria in 1843 that the "time cannot be very distant when the Punjab will fall into our management and the question will be what we shall do as respects the hills."(16) Dalhousie saw the Punjab forests as a means of financing the expansion of imperial rule. If the Punjab were annexed, Dalhousie said, it would pay for itself, and the British Empire would gain "the historical jewel of the Mughal Emperors in the Crown of his own Sovereign."(17) The East India Company board of directors agreed, and the East India Company annexed the Punjab.
Dalhousie toured the region and issued a proclamation on 30 March 1849 declaring all property of the former majaraja, including forest lands, to be state property. The new regime included for the first time in India a centrally organized and policed forest system for a province. Dalhousie's action anticipated his proclamation of 1855 establishing an India -wide Forest Department and indicates how early the new governor general considered the question of forest conservation.(18)
The province of Pegu in southern Burma was annexed in a similar manner. In 1852, hostilities arose between British traders and officers of the King of Ava, who ruled the ancient Burman empire. In response Dalhousie annexed Pegu, which contained a large reserve of teak. Added to the extensive forests in Oudh and the Punjab, the British government and East India Company acquired control over vast forest lands.
Not all annexed territories had abundant forest wealth, and this made the difficulty of expanding the empire in India more pressing. Pegu was of particular concern to Dalhousie, since it constituted the furthest eastern reach of the British Empire in India and defined the boundary to the Far East. The province of Pegu comprised the Kingdom of Pegu and territories 50 miles beyond Prome, a city in what today would be central-south Burma. The heavily forested area around the Sittang and Irrawaddy rivers comprised 32,250 square miles with a population of almost 600,000 people, divided into six districts (Rangoon, Henzada, Tharrawasddy, Bassien, Toungoo, and Prome).(19) Annexation was costly, and Dalhousie therefore needed to obtain reparations and funds for the additional cost of administration and security.
In light of the pressing need to finance expansion, a forestry department was vital. Pegu boasted not only rich veins of coal but also oilfields and teak. Ownership of Pegu meant revenue, including revenue-producing forests that simultaneously would deprive the court of Ava, capital of Burma, of the resources to continue hostilities.(20) These considerations, Dalhousie wrote, overruled a "regard to the natural formation of the country." The boundaries would be fixed to include the rich southern forests extending six miles north of the Myede River.(21)
Control of this teak-rich portion of Burma gave command of the Irrawaddy and Sittang rivers, Dalhousie wrote the king of Ava, and therefore "full control over the trade and the supplies upon which your kingdom so largely depends." He urged the king to sign a treaty confirming the annexation without further hostility.(22) Accordingly, after the conclusion of the treaty Dalhousie appointed a forest officer to collect revenue. He also sent a delegation to the court of Ava to cement the new relationship and take inventory of the territory as they went through the region. Oil fields, coal reserves, forests, all were to be observed and placed into the imperial topography. Cashing in on the booty, in 1855 the government imposed a duty upon teak.(23)
But the governor-general wanted more than Pegu. When Colonel James Outram arrived as Resident in Oudh in 1855, he reported to Dalhousie that the government of Oudh abused its powers, oppressed its subjects, and engaged in no modernizing reforms such as examinations for government servants, efficient tax collections, clear financial accounting, road repair, or policing of bandits. The territory, Outram wrote, was in a "most deplorable" state.(24) With the agreement of the East India Company court of directors, Dalhousie annulled earlier treaties concluded in 1801 and 1837 and demanded the king of Oudh hand civil and military control over to the British for the full annexation of the country into the empire.(25)
The court of directors authorized Dalhousie to assume "authoritatively the powers necessary for the permanent establishment of good government throughout the country" including efficient forestry management.(26) Dalhousie wrote to a friend in England that he had delivered to the Queen not only five million more subjects but 1,300,000 pounds more revenue and 25,000 square miles of territory "without a drop of blood and almost without a murmur."(27) The new territory would be administered on the Punjab model.(28)
As the annexations occurred, Dalhousie appointed superintendents to manage the forests. The British government in India made it clear that "all the forests are the property of Government, and no general permission to cut timber therein will be granted to anyone."(29) The new superintendent in Pegu, John McClelland, received instructions to "mark the trees which may be bought and felled"(30) Accompanied by Captain Phayre, commissioner of Pegu, McClelland set out to implement a more efficient management system. In a report dated 5 April 1854, he described the new forests in such detail and with such an eye for potential use that it lent substantial credibility to his proposals.
McClelland observed first that only a sparse population had settled in the forests, particularly in the hilly areas where the trees had not yet been cut. He described the size of the teak trees, noting that in the easily accessible from lower elevations, most large trees had been removed, though smaller trees were abundant. The teak in the hill forests appeared perfect, "growing on a grey stiff sandy clay in company with several species of large timber trees, which far outnumbered it in quantity." Teak was not diffuse, but "confined to certain localities of small extent where it constitutes the prevailing tree for a few hundred yards, seldom for a mile continuously."(31)
The best teak grew high up in the forests where the timber could be floated down streams in the rainy season, thus avoiding the need to construct a large network of roads. McClelland recommended modern forestry methods, observing that young trees of only two to four feet in girth were harvested in the lowlands, destroying the process of natural seedings that an older tree provided. This waste cut the future yield significantly to satisfy the urge for an immediate profit with no concern for either the forest or for future revenue.(32)
The marketing structure was also wasteful, he reported, as Indian merchants with monopolies over particular forests paid the government little and charged customers dearly. Local inhabitants in the south Pegu forests received advances from merchants in Rangoon, who paid them a set fee to float timber down stream to market even if the trees were hardly more than saplings. McClelland observed that such practices led to a state of lawless exploitation and the depletion of the forests for posterity.(33)
McClelland proposed two simple remedies: 1) a single duty per log rather than a percentage of their worth, thus rendering the harvesting of small trees profitless after the payment of the sizable fee; and 2) reservation of forests by the government so that merchants could only extract timber specifically marked by foresters. To enforce these rules he proposed revenue stations along all the rivers below the teak forests to inspect logs and calculate duty.(34) With a sentiment that would become universal in the establishment of forestry reserves for the rest of the colonies, he concluded:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> [A] forest may be regarded as a growing capital, the resources of which are the young trees, and unless these are preserved and guarded to maturity, it is obvious the forest must necessarily degenerate from the nature of an improving capital to that of a sinking fund, which, within a given time, must become expended. The loss occasioned by the removal of an undersized tree is not merely the difference of value as compared with a full-grown tree as a piece of timber, but must be estimated by the number of years the forest may be deprived, by its removal, of the annual distribution of its seeds, and the time it would otherwise have taken to arrive at maturity....
[I]f we fail in the comparatively simple duty of preserving the old
forests, we can scarcely hope to succeed in the more difficult task of
creating new ones.(35) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Further, he noted,
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> [A] forest ought not to be considered only for a single species because "an exclusive search and use of teak alone ... [has] caused other descriptions of timber to be entirely overlooked. Time and necessity will in due course render these and other resources of the forest better known, [such] as oils, gums and textile material.(36) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dalhousie agreed to ban merchants from choosing their own trees for felling and approved of constructing revenue stations on the rivers for efficient duty collection. He also agreed with McClelland that simply planting new trees without conserving the great tracts of natural woodland made little sense. On 3 August 1855 Dalhousie issued the comprehensive Memorandum of the Government of India, which Stebbing dubbed the "Charter of Indian Forestry" The charter confirmed annexation as a ruling principle and declared that forests must be considered by definition state property if not waste lands or privately owned. The state from this point on considered territory under its control but not privately owned or managed not as "waste land" but as land requiring management and regulation. With this ringing bill of colonial rights, private timber interests could no longer pay a set royalty to extract unlimited timber and also were prohibited from felling dead, felled, or green trees--all belonged to the state along with profits from the sale. With the establishment of forest areas as absolute state property, new methods of scientific forestry could be utilized. From this new legal definition grew the policies and practices of the conservation movement, the first phase of environmentalism.(37)
Dalhousie left India in 1856 with fair prospects for the colony, declaring that India had been "in peace without and within" with "no quarter from which a formidable war could reasonably be expected at present."(38) But only two years later, India was convulsed by the Indian Mutiny, which burst over colonial India and proved the catalyst for both greater deforestation and a more militant environmental response. In May 1857, Indian soldiers unexpectedly rebelled when rumors with religious overtones for both Hindus and Muslims ignited a simmering resentment of British authority and touched off massive revolt. Hindu troops believed that the bullet cartridges they ripped open with their teeth were greased with beef fat, a violation of dietary laws, while among Muslims, the rumors implied that the cartridges were greased with pig fat, a violation of Islamic law. In a desperate mobilization to put down the mutiny, the British government ended the inefficient double government of Crown and Company and established direct control under the Crown. This new centralized colonial regime had profound implications for environmental policy.(39)
During the mutiny, the British had found themselves lacking sufficient means of rapid communication by roads, railways, and canals. Accordingly, Lord Canning, who succeeded Dalhousie as governor-general in 1856, made railway construction a priority of his administration. Canning and his successors Lord Elgin and then Lord Lawrence initiated broad reforms in response to the Queen's proclamation "to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer the government for the benefit of Her Majesty's subjects"(40) Inefficient forest management came to be seen by a series of governors as suicidal and inhumane; government security rested upon a well maintained infrastructure dependent on a steady supply of wood, and the general population required wood for the local economy and for fuel. The Forest Department received a powerful ideological boost and found its push for further state intervention in forest areas better received by British administrators.(41)
Before the mutiny, only the presidencies of Bombay and Madras and the territory of Burma had a scientific forest administration under the authority of the August 1855 charter. The Punjab, Oudh, Bengal, and Assam had formed new forestry departments to move toward scientific management but the crisis created by the mutiny suspended forest development.(42) After the mutiny was successfully subdued, forest administration proceeded under the newly established principles of state ownership.
Lord Canning appointed Dietrich Brandis as the first inspector general of the India -wide Indian Forest Department, a post he held from 1864 to 1883. Forest conservators had already been appointed in Bombay (1847), Madras (1856), and the United Burma Provinces (1857); Brandis in turn appointed forest conservators to the Northwestern Provinces and Central Provinces in 1860, Oudh in 1861, Punjab in 1864, Coorg and Bengal in 1864, Assam in 1868, and Berar in 1868.(43) By the end of 1868, the Forest Department had administrators in every province of the subcontinent. In 1871, the Forest Department was placed under the newly established Department of Revenue and Agriculture, itself under the umbrella of the Home Department. Brandis was followed by Wilhelm Schlich (1883-88), Berthold Ribbentrop (1888-1900), and E. P. Stebbings (1900-17).(44)
The entire forest administration was systematically reorganized and centralized at the national level under the new Indian Forest Act VII of 1865, authored by Hugh Cleghorn, the conservator who originally had provided a model for forest conservancy in Mysore and Madras, and Dietrich Brandis. The act was the first India -wide forest legislation and the first broad-based environmental law applied in the nineteenth century. All the annexed lands, which had been declared government property, fell under the authority of the new act, which determined the fate of an entire "household of nature" that included forests, soft, water quality, and pollution.(45)
The need to settle private claims against forest areas led to the rise of the "multiple use" doctrine of forests for conservation and harvest that served as the model for empire forestry as a whole. In some cases the rights of the user were acquired by sanad (grant), while for communal use the state settled for the trees only and gave the right of the soil (primarily grazing) to the villagers. Islands of private land in the midst of state forests required access through state lands. In some cases the state had rights over certain kinds of trees growing on private or communal property, like the teak trees of Burma.(45)
The growing India -wide Forest Department did not have a ready supply of specially trained forest officers, so appointments were filled by men from other branches of government service who showed themselves fit for "forest life," sometimes naturalists, military men, or sportsmen, sometimes "young gentlemen" from Britain, who until 1891 were awarded jobs through patronage. Some personnel were gained by merging previous agencies as in Madras, where the Jungle Conservancy Department was amalgamated with the Forest Department.(46) Recruitment also depended on specialists recruited from other countries, especially Germany, men like Dietrich Brandis, Wilhelm Schlich, and Berthold Ribbentrop.
By 1885, the inspector-general oversaw 10 conservators of forests, who in turn oversaw 55 deputy conservators, 38 assistant conservators, and thousands of forest guards.(47) In 1900, when newly appointed Inspector General E. P. Stebbing looked back over almost 50 years of the progress in forestry, he was amazed at the accomplishments. Despite formidable obstacles, including a powerful Indian merchant class, resistance by peasants, and adherence to laissez faire policies by many bureaucrats and administrators, eight percent of the entire land area of greater India had been placed under the protected control of the Forest Department.(48) The innovative methods behind this monumental achievement captured the imagination not just of other foresters or would-be foresters but also of a general public throughout the colonies and much of the world.
How broadly did the foresters of colonial India imagine the regeneration of the sub-continent? Such technical concerns as fire protection, grazing policy, demarcation, and working plans were essential for the protection not only of timber but also the entire "household of nature." One writer in The Indian Forester humorously concluded from his observation of "forests" on Mars (the darker spots) that the planet would become an entire desert (the light spots) if the inhabitants did not learn from the mistakes of humans and imitate the protection of forest as in India.(49) This romantic environmental consciousness informed the imagination of many foresters concerned with a wide range of habitat and wildlife protection and is exemplified in the works of Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling wrote as a colonial insider, part of the ruling European class born in India and working either in the civil service or in private business. Writing for Indian newspapers, Kipling gained initial fame both in England and India as a cultural travel writer, representing the Anglo-Indians (Europeans born in India) to themselves and to the British in Britain. Kipling's first story about the forests of India, "In the Rukh" (forest), introduced the boy-hero Mowgh, better known through a reworked version in The Jungle Books. In this first Mowgli story, Mowgli is a full grown adult raised by nature herself. Kipling was inspired after meeting Inspector General Berthold Ribbentrop, who spoke glowingly of the heroes who had the "reboisement of all India in [their] hands."(50) Publication of the story in McClure's Magazine in the United States illustrates the circulation of the accomplishments of the new forestry outside the British empire and how empire forestry captured the imagination of the public through such a best-selling author as Kipling. Kipling described the Forest Service in idealized terms:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Of the wheels of public service that turn under the Indian Government,
there is none more important than the Department of Woods and Forests.... Its servants wrestle with wandering sand torrents and shifting dunes.... They are responsible for all the timber in the State forests of the Hamalayas, as well as the denuded hillsides that the monsoons wash into dry gullies and aching ravines.... They experiment with battalions of foreign trees, and coax the blue gum to take root and perhaps, dry up the Canal fever. In the plains, the chief part of their duty is to see that the belt fire-lines in the forest reserves are kept clean, so when drought comes and the cattle starve, they may throw the reserves open to the villagers' herds and allow the man himself to gather sticks. [T]hey're the doctors and midwives of the huge teak forests of Upper Burma, the rubber of the Eastern Jungles, and the gall-mass of the South: and they are always hampered by lack of funds. But since a Forest Officer's business takes him far from the beaten roads and the regular stations, he learns to grow wise in more than wood-lore alone; to know the people and the polity of the jungle; meeting tiger, bear, leopard, wild-dog, and all the deer, not once or twice after days of beating, but again and again in the execution of his duty. He spends much time in the saddle or under canvas--the friend of newly planted trees, the associate of uncouth rangers and hairy trackers--till the woods, that show his care, in turn set their mark upon him, and he ... grows silent with the silent things of the underbrush.(51)
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Kipling's romanticization of Indian forestry illustrates the complicated late nineteenth-century views of nature, sometimes secular, sometimes pagan, and sometimes teleological, of environmentalists in India. As Muller, the fictionalized Ribbentrop, "the gigantic German who was the head of the woods and forests.... head ranger from Burma to Bombay," surveys the jungle around him in the light of the fire, he explains, "When I am making reports I am a Free Thinker und Atheist, but here in the Rukh I am more than Christian. I am Bagan [pagan] also." But despite his "bagan" sentiments, nature remains ultimately unknowable, and so Muller in desperation admits, "I know dot, Began or Christian, I shall nefer know der inwardness of der Rukh."(52) If the essence of nature is unknowable for civilized man, it was an open book to the ideal forester, Mowgli, nursed on the milk of nature herself. He was, wrote Kipling, "an angel strayed among the wood" who could disappear from sight like a ghost without a sound and then appear like morning mist, cognizant of every trick of the jungle, every inclination of bird, snake and buffalo. Gibson, a forest ranger, knows when he first meets Mowgli that he "must get him into the government service somehow ... he is a miracle." Muller observes that "he is at der beginnings of der history of man--Adam in der garden ... he is older than ... der gods."(53)
Muller tells Mowgli that his new job as a forest guard is "to drive the villager's goats away" when they have no permit, to watch the game, and "to give sure warning of all fires in the Rukh." Mowgli readily accepts, for he loves the forest above all things, and the rule of British forest law protects his home and playground. In youth, a jungle boy, now in maturity, an empire forester.(54)
Mowgli, the future forester and environmentalist, was a refreshing counterbalance to the civilized consumer citizen. He exuded more than boyish charm, he approached the ideal of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's state of nature, a natural man tutored by brother animals in a natural virtue. The moral of the story thus lies in the contrast between civilized society and the state of nature and grace embodied by Mowgli.(55) The new environmental project required men with natural leadership skills, free of what Kipling saw as democratic decadence, willing to work for the good of the whole society.
The premise of the environmental innovations initiated under British imperialism was their emphasis on the good of the state over the good of the individual through the preservation of resources for future use. Local populations had to be reeducated and the principles of laissez-faire that allowed individual enterprise and profit sacrificed for societal benefit. The selfless service of the imperial forester ensured long-term benefits for the Indian people in a graphic illustration of the "white man's burden."(55)
Environmental innovation occurred under the patronage of imperialism precisely because the environmental project and the imperial project were both "right royal" in nature and required the kind of top-down social organization that Kipling advocated in the Jungle Books. Authority came from the forestry official to the native, from the educated Christian to the pagan, from the European to the Indian.
Britain's new environmental policies attracted the attention of officials in Australia, Canada, the Cape, and most of the other British colonies as well as the United States. Though the environmental innovation that occurred under imperialism made a jump to democratic societies, particularly the United States, this jump occurred precisely at that moment when individual rights were also giving way to the powers and prerogatives of the state, often motivated by the same "noblesse oblige" that can be seen in Kipling and British imperial officials. American "manifest destiny" found a ready counterpart in the imperial project to terraform the surface of India and other British colonies for the good of the native population. Whether the paternalistic strategies for resource management are now criticized, or whether they are seen as progenitors of strategies that have saved much of the land surface of the globe, the multiple-use forest innovations in India and the other colonies that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century produced simultaneously the conservation movement and a further projection of imperial power in the British Empire.
(1) E. P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1922), 68, 249; Bertold Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India (Calcutta, 1899), 62, 206-7.
(2) Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (London, 1989), 363-65.
(3) Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London, 1993); see also Richard Garnett, "The British Museum Catalogue as the Basis of a Universal Catalogue" in Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (London, 1899); Barbara McCrimmon, Power, Politics, and Print: The Publication of the British Museum Catalogue, 1881-1900 (Hamden, Conn., 1981).
(4) R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India (Dehra Dun, 1945); Clements R. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London, 1871); F. V. Raper, "Narrative of a Survey for the Purpose of Discovering the Source of the Ganges" Asiatic Researches 11 (New Delhi, 1979), first published c. 1818; James Rennell, The Journals of Major James Rennell, first Surveyor-General of India, written for the information of the Governor of Bengal during his surveys of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, 1764-1767, ed. T. H. D. LaTouche (Calcutta, 1910); George Everest, A series of Letters addressed to His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex (London, 1839); Paul Careter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago, 1987).
(5) E. P. Evans, "Ethical Relations between Man and Beast," Popular Science Monthly, September 1894, 634-46; see also G. F. Pearson, "The Teaching of Forestry" Journal of the Society of Arts 30 (1882): 422-28; F. J. Bramwell and H. Trueman Wood, "Education in Forestry" Journal of the Society of Arts 30 (1882): 879; J. Gamble, "The Advantage of Preliminary Practical Work in the Training of Forest Officers" Indian Forester 18 (1892): 96.
(6) K. Sivaramakrishnan, "Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics" Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 14-17.
(7) Lord Mayor of London and Lord Lovat, The British Empire Forestry Conference (London, 1920), 1, 2; Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India, 37, 38, 43; John Nisbet, "Soil and Situation in Relation to Forest Growth," Indian Forester 20 (1894): 3.
(8) W. B. Turrill, Joseph Dalton Hooker: Botanist, Explorer and Administrator (London, 1963), 50-51; Richard Groves, Green Imperialism, Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995), 454.
(9) Mary McDonald Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), 2-3.
(10) Thomas Munro, "Timber Monopoly in Malabar and Canara," in Major-General Sir Thomas Munro: Selections from his official minutes and other writings, ed. A. J. Arbuthnot, vol. 1 (London, 1881), 178-87; Mary McDonald Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), 2-3.
(11) G. M. Young, quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge, 1959), 248, 257.
(12) E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge, 1959), 253.
(13) Daniel Thorner, "Great Britain and the Development of India's Railways" Journal of Economic History 11 (1951): 389, 393, 397; Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam-Shipping Enterprise in India, 1825-1849 (Philadelphia, 1950), 46, 91-93, 119, 176; Gustav Cohn, Zur Geschichte und Politik des Verkehrswesens (Stuttgart, 1900), 91; "Administrative Report on the Railways in India" Indian Forester 18 0892): 229.
(14) Cyclopaedia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia, 3d ed., s.v. "Dalhousie."
(15) House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1801-1900, The Punjab: 1847-1849, no. 53, 655-65.
(16) Edward Law Ellenborough to the Duke of Wellington, in History of the Indian Administration of Lord Ellenborough: in his Correspondence with the Duke of Wellington: to which is prefixed, by permission of Her Majesty, Lord Ellenborough's Letters to the Queen during that Period, ed. Reginald Colchester (London, 1874), 399.
(17) J. G. A. Baird, Private Letters of the Marquees of Dalhousie (London, 1911), 62.
(18) National Archives, New Delhi [hereafter NAND], Secret Consultations, 28 April 1849, nos. 41 and 21; ibid., Secret Consultations, 28 April 1849, no. 21; National Archives, Governor General's Camp Letters to the Court of Directors, 20 April 1849, no. 21; Stebbing, History, 205-6.
(19) A. P. Phayre, Report on the Administration of the Province of Pegu for 1854-1855 and 1855-1856, par. 2-12; NAND, Secret Consultations:. 29 December 1852, no. 15; NAND, Letters to the Secret Committee, 5 January 1853, no. 3, pars. 2-4.
(20) NAND, Letters from the Secret Committee, 6 September, 1852, no. 1524, par. 21; NAND, Secret Consultations. 26 November 1852, no. 1.
(21) NAND, Secret Consultations, 16 February 1853, nos. 11 and 12; 29 April, 1853, nos. 71 and 73; D. G. E. Hall, The Dalhousie--Phayre Correspondence: 1852-1856 (London, 1932), Letters, no. 8, 16-18; no. 15, 31-33; 19, 37-38.
(22) NAND, Secret Consultations, 29 December 1852, no. 4.
(23) NAND, Secret Consultations, 29 December 1852, no. 15; E. P. Stebbing, "Pioneers of Indian Forestry; Captain Forsyth and the Highlands of Central India," Indian Forester 30 (1904): 339; NAND, Secret Consultations: 29 June 1855, no. 2; NAND, Letter to the Secret Committee 8 August 1855, no. 45; Political Letters to the Court of Directors: 22 August 1856, no. 83, pars. 10-18.
(24) NAND, Political Consultations, 28 December 1855, no. 319, par. 2, see also 4, 10-27, 28-44.
(25) Baird, Private Letters of the Marquees of Dalhousie, 33, 169, 262.
(26) NAND, Political Letters from the Court of Directors and the Secretary of State, 21 November 1855, no. 33, par. 2; 10 December 1856, no. 47, par. 4.
(27) Baird, Private Letters of the Marquees of Dalhousie, 369; see also National Archives, Political Letters from the Court of Directors and the Secretary of State, 10 December 1856, no. 47, pars. 2-3.
(28) NAND, Miscellaneous Branch, Consultations, 27 May 1859, nos. 381-82, pars. 145-59; NAND, Political Consultations, 6 June 1856, no. 193, pars. 47-56; 6 June 1856, no. 193, pars. 19-22.
(29) Stebbing, History, 244.
(30) Ibid.
(31) McClelland, quoted in Stebbing, History, 244, 247.
(32) Ibid., 248.
(33) Ibid., 249.
(34) John McClelland, "On Forest Settlement and Administration" Indian Forester 19 (1893): 24.
(35) McClelland, quoted in Stebbing, History, 251 (emphasis in original).
(36) Ibid., 252, 255.
(37) "Scientific Forestry" Indian Forester 33 (1907): 89; Stebbing, History, 206.
(38) Col. Pearson, "Recollection of the Early Days of the Indian Forest Department, 1858-1864" Indian Forester 29 (1903): 313-19.
(39) Ibid.
(40) Ibid.
(41) "Forest Administration and Revenue Making" Indian Forester 31 (1905): 246.
(42) Tuscan, "Forest Administration in the Central Provinces," Indian Forester 19 (1893): 45, 332.
(43) Ibid.
(44) Sudhir Chandra, "Profiles of the Founders of Indian Forestry Commemorated in Plant Names (1786-1934)," in History of Forestry in India, ed. Ajay S. Rawat (Delhi, 1991), 337-38.
(45) "Grazing and Commutation in the C.P.," Indian Forester 18 (1892): 415; "Grazing in Forest Lands" Indian Forester 26 (1900): 235; "The Effects of Grazing on Forests," Indian Forester 26 (1900): 283; Gem, "A Plea for Protected Forests, Indian Forester 19 (1893): 123-36.
(46) Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India, 81, 82.
(47) Ibid., 78, 80.
(48) Roy Robinson, "Forestry in the British Empire," Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 84 (1936): 795-96.
(49) R. D., "The Forests of Planet Mars," Indian Forester 33 (1907): 725-26.
(50) Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle book (Oxford, 1987), 327.
(51) Ibid.
(52) Ibid., 344.
(53) Ibid.
(54) Ibid., 343.
(55) Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" London Times, 4 February 1899, 26, 221; New York Tribune, 5 February 1899.
Gregory Barton is an assistant professor of history at the University of Redlands.
Gregory Barton traces the development of environmental policies in nineteenth-century British India, showing that these paternalist, and oft-criticized, strategies for resource management became the model for conservation efforts worldwide.
by GREGORY BARTON
Nearly 20 years before the first national park, Yellowstone, was established in the United States in 1872, British colonial authorities in India already had begun a program to acquire and set aside vast tracts of forest lands for environmental preservation. On 3 August 1855, Lord Dalhousie, the governor general of India, reversed previous laissez-faire policy to establish the India Forest Department and annex large areas of sparsely populated lands in India. These lands were declared protected areas and staffed by foresters, fireguards, rangers, and administrators. Over the next decades, forestry in India became an international profession with global specialists ruling an empire of trees and grasslands.(1)
The development of environmental practice in India depended upon a general Victorian decline of the entrepreneurial ideal that allowed private parties to exploit resources for immediate gain without regard for the future, and a concurrent shift toward state intervention. Spurred by the "utilitarian" philosophy of English political theorist Jeremy Bentham, who privileged the common social good over indiscriminate individualism, appeals were made to reform the new industrial cities and impose new sanitation, police, education, and work standards. These reforms marked a new degree of state intervention hitherto unknown in liberal Victorian society. Against this shift from Adam Smith individualism to Benthamite collectivism emerged new environmental interventions--paternalistic, radical, and previously untried, first in British India, then the other British colonies and the United States.(2)
The new environmental policies served in turn to support British imperialism in India. Unlike the conservative French and English royal forests reserved for hunting by the privileged elite, or the later American concept of total protection in national parks, the new colonial environmentalism was intended to generate income for the imperial British state through strict control of India's natural resources. Lord Dalhousie's new forest policies greatly expanded British authority over the land and people of India, a colonial empire that the British had procured piecemeal over the course of several centuries of mercantile and military exploitation. Thus, environmentalism and imperialism have a shared past, and the newly protected forests marked a symbiotic alliance of environmental concern with expansion of state power in India.
As Thomas Richards points out in The Imperial Archive, the drive for knowledge and the penchant to divide and catalogue the world--central to the environmental project--grew from taking stock of the "inventory" of imperialism.(3) Part of that inventory was the discovery, subjection, demarcation, and effective management of nature. British officers in India had been surveying and mapping the subcontinent since the late eighteenth century, a difficult and often dangerous task. Prominent among nineteenth-century surveyors were such recognizable names as that of George Everest.(4)
India held a particular allure for civil and government specialists throughout the nineteenth century. The subcontinent, with its vast forests, savannas, and grasslands studded with exotic animals and fauna, beckoned to young British graduates who saw not a wild waste of jungle and savanna but a frontier of new knowledge, adventure, and discovery. British investment in India's economy and infrastructure increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Administrators hired specialists in botany or forestry from a number of European countries, particularly Germans such as Berthold Ribbentrop, who was inspector-general of forests in India from 1888 to 1900.(5)
Paradoxically, not only India's bounty but its critical lack of resources attracted European interest. For example, while India at first easily supplied "sleepers," the railroad ties for British-built tracks that crisscrossed the subcontinent, and firewood to power the steam-driven locomotives, a critical shortage had developed by the 1840s. As the British garnered more territory, demand on the forests for wood increased. Larger populations led to more intensive local burning and grazing, and the demand for firewood skyrocketed in burgeoning villages that competed with tracks and steam engines for local resources. Dwindling supplies of English oak at home, combined with newly available rail access between the interior where wood was harvested and the ports where it was shipped abroad, expanded the export market for Malabar teak, used by the British navy. A rising market for exotic woods like aromatic sandalwood placed an added strain on the supplies of timber in accessible areas. All of these demands on the timber supply added up to a critical shortage by the time Lord Dalhousie took office.(6)
In addition, India's forest administrators feared the potential long-term environmental effects of deforestation caused by indiscriminate logging. Contemporary climate theorists warned that the destruction of forests by man's artificial interference eventually would affect cycles of rain and evaporation, resulting in vast desert areas and the potential ruin of civilization if deforestation continued.(7) J. D. Hooker, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, alerted Dalhousie to the potential economic and climatic effects of deforestation and, along with the extensive writings of surgeon Edward Green Balfour on Indian forest issues, convinced Dalhousie to support modern scientific forestry methods and conservation.(8)
Previous attempts at conservation in India had failed for lack of political support. As early as 1805, the British government requested the British East India Company, which already controlled large parts of the coastal regions, to investigate the feasibility of harvesting Malabar teak in Madras to meet the needs of British shipbuilding during the Napoleonic war. Although the East India Company was a private trading company commissioned in 1600, in India it functioned as a state entity, enjoying a monopoly of trade in the areas it ruled. Acting at the direction of the British parliament, it shared authority in India with government officials. The company appointed a former police officer, Captain Watson, as India's first conservator of forests in 1806. Watson's two-pronged plan involved placing a tax on teak in order to simultaneously slow its harvest by private interests and raise money for the government, and then purchasing the teak from the private dealers. Together, these measures would guard against over-exploitation and ensure a steady supply of teak.(9)
After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, however, the navy had less need of teak, and a new governor of Madras, Thomas Munro, felt that the timber royalty unnecessarily raised the opposition of Indian princes who objected to the tax placed on forests under their authority. Munro also felt pressure from Indian merchants who objected strenuously to a tax that cut severely into their profits and from peasants who saw traditional access to the forest sharply curtailed. The new governor rescinded the teak regulations, abolished Captain Watson's position, and allowed the free market to operate as it had before.(10)
Lord Dalhousie's tenure as governor-general from 1848 to 1856 saw the acquisition of territory and implementation of administrative reforms for which posterity dubbed Dalhousie "the great Proconsul." As G. M. Young has noted, he was a curious combination of the "Tory gentleman and the scientific Benthamite administrator"(11)
Like many government officials, Dalhousie held several posts concurrently. As a member of the Board of Trade, he helped regulate the British railways in India. Intervention in local affairs held no ideological complications for Dalhousie, and he saw anything upon which "the whole machinery of society will be stimulated" as fair game.(12) Thus he encouraged state ownership and regulation of railways and established a publicly guaranteed stock company to construct railroads. Subsequent administrations carried on his vision for complete nationalization of the rails.(13)
Dalhousie's support for conservation was unapologetically imperialist. Upon reaching the capital at Calcutta for his inauguration in 1848, he proclaimed that "we are Lords Paramount of India, and our policy is to acquire as direct a dominion over the territories in possession of the native princes, as we already hold over the other half of India."(14) Under his administration, Crown and Company annexed eight states: the Punjab, Pegu, Satara, Samalpur, Jhansi, Nagpur, Berar, and Oudh, making their rulers vassals to the British Empire.
Dalhousie's annexation of the Punjab region of northwestern India, then ruled by a young Sikh maharaja, was typical of the way he extended British control. In a letter to a parliamentary committee in 1849, Dalhousie argued that the Sikh government there had violated the 1846 treaties of Lahore and Bhyrowal by defaulting on a debt owed the British government. He also charged that the Sikhs instigated unending hostilities toward Britain--a situation exacerbated by the minority of the young maharaja who could not control his subjects.(15) The Punjab was rich in unexploited timber resources, and its hilly forested terrain had been eyed by the British well before Dalhousie. Lord Ellenborough, governor general from 1842-44, predicted in his correspondence with the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria in 1843 that the "time cannot be very distant when the Punjab will fall into our management and the question will be what we shall do as respects the hills."(16) Dalhousie saw the Punjab forests as a means of financing the expansion of imperial rule. If the Punjab were annexed, Dalhousie said, it would pay for itself, and the British Empire would gain "the historical jewel of the Mughal Emperors in the Crown of his own Sovereign."(17) The East India Company board of directors agreed, and the East India Company annexed the Punjab.
Dalhousie toured the region and issued a proclamation on 30 March 1849 declaring all property of the former majaraja, including forest lands, to be state property. The new regime included for the first time in India a centrally organized and policed forest system for a province. Dalhousie's action anticipated his proclamation of 1855 establishing an India -wide Forest Department and indicates how early the new governor general considered the question of forest conservation.(18)
The province of Pegu in southern Burma was annexed in a similar manner. In 1852, hostilities arose between British traders and officers of the King of Ava, who ruled the ancient Burman empire. In response Dalhousie annexed Pegu, which contained a large reserve of teak. Added to the extensive forests in Oudh and the Punjab, the British government and East India Company acquired control over vast forest lands.
Not all annexed territories had abundant forest wealth, and this made the difficulty of expanding the empire in India more pressing. Pegu was of particular concern to Dalhousie, since it constituted the furthest eastern reach of the British Empire in India and defined the boundary to the Far East. The province of Pegu comprised the Kingdom of Pegu and territories 50 miles beyond Prome, a city in what today would be central-south Burma. The heavily forested area around the Sittang and Irrawaddy rivers comprised 32,250 square miles with a population of almost 600,000 people, divided into six districts (Rangoon, Henzada, Tharrawasddy, Bassien, Toungoo, and Prome).(19) Annexation was costly, and Dalhousie therefore needed to obtain reparations and funds for the additional cost of administration and security.
In light of the pressing need to finance expansion, a forestry department was vital. Pegu boasted not only rich veins of coal but also oilfields and teak. Ownership of Pegu meant revenue, including revenue-producing forests that simultaneously would deprive the court of Ava, capital of Burma, of the resources to continue hostilities.(20) These considerations, Dalhousie wrote, overruled a "regard to the natural formation of the country." The boundaries would be fixed to include the rich southern forests extending six miles north of the Myede River.(21)
Control of this teak-rich portion of Burma gave command of the Irrawaddy and Sittang rivers, Dalhousie wrote the king of Ava, and therefore "full control over the trade and the supplies upon which your kingdom so largely depends." He urged the king to sign a treaty confirming the annexation without further hostility.(22) Accordingly, after the conclusion of the treaty Dalhousie appointed a forest officer to collect revenue. He also sent a delegation to the court of Ava to cement the new relationship and take inventory of the territory as they went through the region. Oil fields, coal reserves, forests, all were to be observed and placed into the imperial topography. Cashing in on the booty, in 1855 the government imposed a duty upon teak.(23)
But the governor-general wanted more than Pegu. When Colonel James Outram arrived as Resident in Oudh in 1855, he reported to Dalhousie that the government of Oudh abused its powers, oppressed its subjects, and engaged in no modernizing reforms such as examinations for government servants, efficient tax collections, clear financial accounting, road repair, or policing of bandits. The territory, Outram wrote, was in a "most deplorable" state.(24) With the agreement of the East India Company court of directors, Dalhousie annulled earlier treaties concluded in 1801 and 1837 and demanded the king of Oudh hand civil and military control over to the British for the full annexation of the country into the empire.(25)
The court of directors authorized Dalhousie to assume "authoritatively the powers necessary for the permanent establishment of good government throughout the country" including efficient forestry management.(26) Dalhousie wrote to a friend in England that he had delivered to the Queen not only five million more subjects but 1,300,000 pounds more revenue and 25,000 square miles of territory "without a drop of blood and almost without a murmur."(27) The new territory would be administered on the Punjab model.(28)
As the annexations occurred, Dalhousie appointed superintendents to manage the forests. The British government in India made it clear that "all the forests are the property of Government, and no general permission to cut timber therein will be granted to anyone."(29) The new superintendent in Pegu, John McClelland, received instructions to "mark the trees which may be bought and felled"(30) Accompanied by Captain Phayre, commissioner of Pegu, McClelland set out to implement a more efficient management system. In a report dated 5 April 1854, he described the new forests in such detail and with such an eye for potential use that it lent substantial credibility to his proposals.
McClelland observed first that only a sparse population had settled in the forests, particularly in the hilly areas where the trees had not yet been cut. He described the size of the teak trees, noting that in the easily accessible from lower elevations, most large trees had been removed, though smaller trees were abundant. The teak in the hill forests appeared perfect, "growing on a grey stiff sandy clay in company with several species of large timber trees, which far outnumbered it in quantity." Teak was not diffuse, but "confined to certain localities of small extent where it constitutes the prevailing tree for a few hundred yards, seldom for a mile continuously."(31)
The best teak grew high up in the forests where the timber could be floated down streams in the rainy season, thus avoiding the need to construct a large network of roads. McClelland recommended modern forestry methods, observing that young trees of only two to four feet in girth were harvested in the lowlands, destroying the process of natural seedings that an older tree provided. This waste cut the future yield significantly to satisfy the urge for an immediate profit with no concern for either the forest or for future revenue.(32)
The marketing structure was also wasteful, he reported, as Indian merchants with monopolies over particular forests paid the government little and charged customers dearly. Local inhabitants in the south Pegu forests received advances from merchants in Rangoon, who paid them a set fee to float timber down stream to market even if the trees were hardly more than saplings. McClelland observed that such practices led to a state of lawless exploitation and the depletion of the forests for posterity.(33)
McClelland proposed two simple remedies: 1) a single duty per log rather than a percentage of their worth, thus rendering the harvesting of small trees profitless after the payment of the sizable fee; and 2) reservation of forests by the government so that merchants could only extract timber specifically marked by foresters. To enforce these rules he proposed revenue stations along all the rivers below the teak forests to inspect logs and calculate duty.(34) With a sentiment that would become universal in the establishment of forestry reserves for the rest of the colonies, he concluded:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> [A] forest may be regarded as a growing capital, the resources of which are the young trees, and unless these are preserved and guarded to maturity, it is obvious the forest must necessarily degenerate from the nature of an improving capital to that of a sinking fund, which, within a given time, must become expended. The loss occasioned by the removal of an undersized tree is not merely the difference of value as compared with a full-grown tree as a piece of timber, but must be estimated by the number of years the forest may be deprived, by its removal, of the annual distribution of its seeds, and the time it would otherwise have taken to arrive at maturity....
[I]f we fail in the comparatively simple duty of preserving the old
forests, we can scarcely hope to succeed in the more difficult task of
creating new ones.(35) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Further, he noted,
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> [A] forest ought not to be considered only for a single species because "an exclusive search and use of teak alone ... [has] caused other descriptions of timber to be entirely overlooked. Time and necessity will in due course render these and other resources of the forest better known, [such] as oils, gums and textile material.(36) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dalhousie agreed to ban merchants from choosing their own trees for felling and approved of constructing revenue stations on the rivers for efficient duty collection. He also agreed with McClelland that simply planting new trees without conserving the great tracts of natural woodland made little sense. On 3 August 1855 Dalhousie issued the comprehensive Memorandum of the Government of India, which Stebbing dubbed the "Charter of Indian Forestry" The charter confirmed annexation as a ruling principle and declared that forests must be considered by definition state property if not waste lands or privately owned. The state from this point on considered territory under its control but not privately owned or managed not as "waste land" but as land requiring management and regulation. With this ringing bill of colonial rights, private timber interests could no longer pay a set royalty to extract unlimited timber and also were prohibited from felling dead, felled, or green trees--all belonged to the state along with profits from the sale. With the establishment of forest areas as absolute state property, new methods of scientific forestry could be utilized. From this new legal definition grew the policies and practices of the conservation movement, the first phase of environmentalism.(37)
Dalhousie left India in 1856 with fair prospects for the colony, declaring that India had been "in peace without and within" with "no quarter from which a formidable war could reasonably be expected at present."(38) But only two years later, India was convulsed by the Indian Mutiny, which burst over colonial India and proved the catalyst for both greater deforestation and a more militant environmental response. In May 1857, Indian soldiers unexpectedly rebelled when rumors with religious overtones for both Hindus and Muslims ignited a simmering resentment of British authority and touched off massive revolt. Hindu troops believed that the bullet cartridges they ripped open with their teeth were greased with beef fat, a violation of dietary laws, while among Muslims, the rumors implied that the cartridges were greased with pig fat, a violation of Islamic law. In a desperate mobilization to put down the mutiny, the British government ended the inefficient double government of Crown and Company and established direct control under the Crown. This new centralized colonial regime had profound implications for environmental policy.(39)
During the mutiny, the British had found themselves lacking sufficient means of rapid communication by roads, railways, and canals. Accordingly, Lord Canning, who succeeded Dalhousie as governor-general in 1856, made railway construction a priority of his administration. Canning and his successors Lord Elgin and then Lord Lawrence initiated broad reforms in response to the Queen's proclamation "to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer the government for the benefit of Her Majesty's subjects"(40) Inefficient forest management came to be seen by a series of governors as suicidal and inhumane; government security rested upon a well maintained infrastructure dependent on a steady supply of wood, and the general population required wood for the local economy and for fuel. The Forest Department received a powerful ideological boost and found its push for further state intervention in forest areas better received by British administrators.(41)
Before the mutiny, only the presidencies of Bombay and Madras and the territory of Burma had a scientific forest administration under the authority of the August 1855 charter. The Punjab, Oudh, Bengal, and Assam had formed new forestry departments to move toward scientific management but the crisis created by the mutiny suspended forest development.(42) After the mutiny was successfully subdued, forest administration proceeded under the newly established principles of state ownership.
Lord Canning appointed Dietrich Brandis as the first inspector general of the India -wide Indian Forest Department, a post he held from 1864 to 1883. Forest conservators had already been appointed in Bombay (1847), Madras (1856), and the United Burma Provinces (1857); Brandis in turn appointed forest conservators to the Northwestern Provinces and Central Provinces in 1860, Oudh in 1861, Punjab in 1864, Coorg and Bengal in 1864, Assam in 1868, and Berar in 1868.(43) By the end of 1868, the Forest Department had administrators in every province of the subcontinent. In 1871, the Forest Department was placed under the newly established Department of Revenue and Agriculture, itself under the umbrella of the Home Department. Brandis was followed by Wilhelm Schlich (1883-88), Berthold Ribbentrop (1888-1900), and E. P. Stebbings (1900-17).(44)
The entire forest administration was systematically reorganized and centralized at the national level under the new Indian Forest Act VII of 1865, authored by Hugh Cleghorn, the conservator who originally had provided a model for forest conservancy in Mysore and Madras, and Dietrich Brandis. The act was the first India -wide forest legislation and the first broad-based environmental law applied in the nineteenth century. All the annexed lands, which had been declared government property, fell under the authority of the new act, which determined the fate of an entire "household of nature" that included forests, soft, water quality, and pollution.(45)
The need to settle private claims against forest areas led to the rise of the "multiple use" doctrine of forests for conservation and harvest that served as the model for empire forestry as a whole. In some cases the rights of the user were acquired by sanad (grant), while for communal use the state settled for the trees only and gave the right of the soil (primarily grazing) to the villagers. Islands of private land in the midst of state forests required access through state lands. In some cases the state had rights over certain kinds of trees growing on private or communal property, like the teak trees of Burma.(45)
The growing India -wide Forest Department did not have a ready supply of specially trained forest officers, so appointments were filled by men from other branches of government service who showed themselves fit for "forest life," sometimes naturalists, military men, or sportsmen, sometimes "young gentlemen" from Britain, who until 1891 were awarded jobs through patronage. Some personnel were gained by merging previous agencies as in Madras, where the Jungle Conservancy Department was amalgamated with the Forest Department.(46) Recruitment also depended on specialists recruited from other countries, especially Germany, men like Dietrich Brandis, Wilhelm Schlich, and Berthold Ribbentrop.
By 1885, the inspector-general oversaw 10 conservators of forests, who in turn oversaw 55 deputy conservators, 38 assistant conservators, and thousands of forest guards.(47) In 1900, when newly appointed Inspector General E. P. Stebbing looked back over almost 50 years of the progress in forestry, he was amazed at the accomplishments. Despite formidable obstacles, including a powerful Indian merchant class, resistance by peasants, and adherence to laissez faire policies by many bureaucrats and administrators, eight percent of the entire land area of greater India had been placed under the protected control of the Forest Department.(48) The innovative methods behind this monumental achievement captured the imagination not just of other foresters or would-be foresters but also of a general public throughout the colonies and much of the world.
How broadly did the foresters of colonial India imagine the regeneration of the sub-continent? Such technical concerns as fire protection, grazing policy, demarcation, and working plans were essential for the protection not only of timber but also the entire "household of nature." One writer in The Indian Forester humorously concluded from his observation of "forests" on Mars (the darker spots) that the planet would become an entire desert (the light spots) if the inhabitants did not learn from the mistakes of humans and imitate the protection of forest as in India.(49) This romantic environmental consciousness informed the imagination of many foresters concerned with a wide range of habitat and wildlife protection and is exemplified in the works of Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling wrote as a colonial insider, part of the ruling European class born in India and working either in the civil service or in private business. Writing for Indian newspapers, Kipling gained initial fame both in England and India as a cultural travel writer, representing the Anglo-Indians (Europeans born in India) to themselves and to the British in Britain. Kipling's first story about the forests of India, "In the Rukh" (forest), introduced the boy-hero Mowgh, better known through a reworked version in The Jungle Books. In this first Mowgli story, Mowgli is a full grown adult raised by nature herself. Kipling was inspired after meeting Inspector General Berthold Ribbentrop, who spoke glowingly of the heroes who had the "reboisement of all India in [their] hands."(50) Publication of the story in McClure's Magazine in the United States illustrates the circulation of the accomplishments of the new forestry outside the British empire and how empire forestry captured the imagination of the public through such a best-selling author as Kipling. Kipling described the Forest Service in idealized terms:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Of the wheels of public service that turn under the Indian Government,
there is none more important than the Department of Woods and Forests.... Its servants wrestle with wandering sand torrents and shifting dunes.... They are responsible for all the timber in the State forests of the Hamalayas, as well as the denuded hillsides that the monsoons wash into dry gullies and aching ravines.... They experiment with battalions of foreign trees, and coax the blue gum to take root and perhaps, dry up the Canal fever. In the plains, the chief part of their duty is to see that the belt fire-lines in the forest reserves are kept clean, so when drought comes and the cattle starve, they may throw the reserves open to the villagers' herds and allow the man himself to gather sticks. [T]hey're the doctors and midwives of the huge teak forests of Upper Burma, the rubber of the Eastern Jungles, and the gall-mass of the South: and they are always hampered by lack of funds. But since a Forest Officer's business takes him far from the beaten roads and the regular stations, he learns to grow wise in more than wood-lore alone; to know the people and the polity of the jungle; meeting tiger, bear, leopard, wild-dog, and all the deer, not once or twice after days of beating, but again and again in the execution of his duty. He spends much time in the saddle or under canvas--the friend of newly planted trees, the associate of uncouth rangers and hairy trackers--till the woods, that show his care, in turn set their mark upon him, and he ... grows silent with the silent things of the underbrush.(51)
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Kipling's romanticization of Indian forestry illustrates the complicated late nineteenth-century views of nature, sometimes secular, sometimes pagan, and sometimes teleological, of environmentalists in India. As Muller, the fictionalized Ribbentrop, "the gigantic German who was the head of the woods and forests.... head ranger from Burma to Bombay," surveys the jungle around him in the light of the fire, he explains, "When I am making reports I am a Free Thinker und Atheist, but here in the Rukh I am more than Christian. I am Bagan [pagan] also." But despite his "bagan" sentiments, nature remains ultimately unknowable, and so Muller in desperation admits, "I know dot, Began or Christian, I shall nefer know der inwardness of der Rukh."(52) If the essence of nature is unknowable for civilized man, it was an open book to the ideal forester, Mowgli, nursed on the milk of nature herself. He was, wrote Kipling, "an angel strayed among the wood" who could disappear from sight like a ghost without a sound and then appear like morning mist, cognizant of every trick of the jungle, every inclination of bird, snake and buffalo. Gibson, a forest ranger, knows when he first meets Mowgli that he "must get him into the government service somehow ... he is a miracle." Muller observes that "he is at der beginnings of der history of man--Adam in der garden ... he is older than ... der gods."(53)
Muller tells Mowgli that his new job as a forest guard is "to drive the villager's goats away" when they have no permit, to watch the game, and "to give sure warning of all fires in the Rukh." Mowgli readily accepts, for he loves the forest above all things, and the rule of British forest law protects his home and playground. In youth, a jungle boy, now in maturity, an empire forester.(54)
Mowgli, the future forester and environmentalist, was a refreshing counterbalance to the civilized consumer citizen. He exuded more than boyish charm, he approached the ideal of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's state of nature, a natural man tutored by brother animals in a natural virtue. The moral of the story thus lies in the contrast between civilized society and the state of nature and grace embodied by Mowgli.(55) The new environmental project required men with natural leadership skills, free of what Kipling saw as democratic decadence, willing to work for the good of the whole society.
The premise of the environmental innovations initiated under British imperialism was their emphasis on the good of the state over the good of the individual through the preservation of resources for future use. Local populations had to be reeducated and the principles of laissez-faire that allowed individual enterprise and profit sacrificed for societal benefit. The selfless service of the imperial forester ensured long-term benefits for the Indian people in a graphic illustration of the "white man's burden."(55)
Environmental innovation occurred under the patronage of imperialism precisely because the environmental project and the imperial project were both "right royal" in nature and required the kind of top-down social organization that Kipling advocated in the Jungle Books. Authority came from the forestry official to the native, from the educated Christian to the pagan, from the European to the Indian.
Britain's new environmental policies attracted the attention of officials in Australia, Canada, the Cape, and most of the other British colonies as well as the United States. Though the environmental innovation that occurred under imperialism made a jump to democratic societies, particularly the United States, this jump occurred precisely at that moment when individual rights were also giving way to the powers and prerogatives of the state, often motivated by the same "noblesse oblige" that can be seen in Kipling and British imperial officials. American "manifest destiny" found a ready counterpart in the imperial project to terraform the surface of India and other British colonies for the good of the native population. Whether the paternalistic strategies for resource management are now criticized, or whether they are seen as progenitors of strategies that have saved much of the land surface of the globe, the multiple-use forest innovations in India and the other colonies that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century produced simultaneously the conservation movement and a further projection of imperial power in the British Empire.
(1) E. P. Stebbing, The Forests of India, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1922), 68, 249; Bertold Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India (Calcutta, 1899), 62, 206-7.
(2) Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (London, 1989), 363-65.
(3) Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London, 1993); see also Richard Garnett, "The British Museum Catalogue as the Basis of a Universal Catalogue" in Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (London, 1899); Barbara McCrimmon, Power, Politics, and Print: The Publication of the British Museum Catalogue, 1881-1900 (Hamden, Conn., 1981).
(4) R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India (Dehra Dun, 1945); Clements R. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London, 1871); F. V. Raper, "Narrative of a Survey for the Purpose of Discovering the Source of the Ganges" Asiatic Researches 11 (New Delhi, 1979), first published c. 1818; James Rennell, The Journals of Major James Rennell, first Surveyor-General of India, written for the information of the Governor of Bengal during his surveys of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, 1764-1767, ed. T. H. D. LaTouche (Calcutta, 1910); George Everest, A series of Letters addressed to His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex (London, 1839); Paul Careter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago, 1987).
(5) E. P. Evans, "Ethical Relations between Man and Beast," Popular Science Monthly, September 1894, 634-46; see also G. F. Pearson, "The Teaching of Forestry" Journal of the Society of Arts 30 (1882): 422-28; F. J. Bramwell and H. Trueman Wood, "Education in Forestry" Journal of the Society of Arts 30 (1882): 879; J. Gamble, "The Advantage of Preliminary Practical Work in the Training of Forest Officers" Indian Forester 18 (1892): 96.
(6) K. Sivaramakrishnan, "Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics" Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 14-17.
(7) Lord Mayor of London and Lord Lovat, The British Empire Forestry Conference (London, 1920), 1, 2; Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India, 37, 38, 43; John Nisbet, "Soil and Situation in Relation to Forest Growth," Indian Forester 20 (1894): 3.
(8) W. B. Turrill, Joseph Dalton Hooker: Botanist, Explorer and Administrator (London, 1963), 50-51; Richard Groves, Green Imperialism, Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995), 454.
(9) Mary McDonald Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), 2-3.
(10) Thomas Munro, "Timber Monopoly in Malabar and Canara," in Major-General Sir Thomas Munro: Selections from his official minutes and other writings, ed. A. J. Arbuthnot, vol. 1 (London, 1881), 178-87; Mary McDonald Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), 2-3.
(11) G. M. Young, quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge, 1959), 248, 257.
(12) E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge, 1959), 253.
(13) Daniel Thorner, "Great Britain and the Development of India's Railways" Journal of Economic History 11 (1951): 389, 393, 397; Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam-Shipping Enterprise in India, 1825-1849 (Philadelphia, 1950), 46, 91-93, 119, 176; Gustav Cohn, Zur Geschichte und Politik des Verkehrswesens (Stuttgart, 1900), 91; "Administrative Report on the Railways in India" Indian Forester 18 0892): 229.
(14) Cyclopaedia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia, 3d ed., s.v. "Dalhousie."
(15) House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1801-1900, The Punjab: 1847-1849, no. 53, 655-65.
(16) Edward Law Ellenborough to the Duke of Wellington, in History of the Indian Administration of Lord Ellenborough: in his Correspondence with the Duke of Wellington: to which is prefixed, by permission of Her Majesty, Lord Ellenborough's Letters to the Queen during that Period, ed. Reginald Colchester (London, 1874), 399.
(17) J. G. A. Baird, Private Letters of the Marquees of Dalhousie (London, 1911), 62.
(18) National Archives, New Delhi [hereafter NAND], Secret Consultations, 28 April 1849, nos. 41 and 21; ibid., Secret Consultations, 28 April 1849, no. 21; National Archives, Governor General's Camp Letters to the Court of Directors, 20 April 1849, no. 21; Stebbing, History, 205-6.
(19) A. P. Phayre, Report on the Administration of the Province of Pegu for 1854-1855 and 1855-1856, par. 2-12; NAND, Secret Consultations:. 29 December 1852, no. 15; NAND, Letters to the Secret Committee, 5 January 1853, no. 3, pars. 2-4.
(20) NAND, Letters from the Secret Committee, 6 September, 1852, no. 1524, par. 21; NAND, Secret Consultations. 26 November 1852, no. 1.
(21) NAND, Secret Consultations, 16 February 1853, nos. 11 and 12; 29 April, 1853, nos. 71 and 73; D. G. E. Hall, The Dalhousie--Phayre Correspondence: 1852-1856 (London, 1932), Letters, no. 8, 16-18; no. 15, 31-33; 19, 37-38.
(22) NAND, Secret Consultations, 29 December 1852, no. 4.
(23) NAND, Secret Consultations, 29 December 1852, no. 15; E. P. Stebbing, "Pioneers of Indian Forestry; Captain Forsyth and the Highlands of Central India," Indian Forester 30 (1904): 339; NAND, Secret Consultations: 29 June 1855, no. 2; NAND, Letter to the Secret Committee 8 August 1855, no. 45; Political Letters to the Court of Directors: 22 August 1856, no. 83, pars. 10-18.
(24) NAND, Political Consultations, 28 December 1855, no. 319, par. 2, see also 4, 10-27, 28-44.
(25) Baird, Private Letters of the Marquees of Dalhousie, 33, 169, 262.
(26) NAND, Political Letters from the Court of Directors and the Secretary of State, 21 November 1855, no. 33, par. 2; 10 December 1856, no. 47, par. 4.
(27) Baird, Private Letters of the Marquees of Dalhousie, 369; see also National Archives, Political Letters from the Court of Directors and the Secretary of State, 10 December 1856, no. 47, pars. 2-3.
(28) NAND, Miscellaneous Branch, Consultations, 27 May 1859, nos. 381-82, pars. 145-59; NAND, Political Consultations, 6 June 1856, no. 193, pars. 47-56; 6 June 1856, no. 193, pars. 19-22.
(29) Stebbing, History, 244.
(30) Ibid.
(31) McClelland, quoted in Stebbing, History, 244, 247.
(32) Ibid., 248.
(33) Ibid., 249.
(34) John McClelland, "On Forest Settlement and Administration" Indian Forester 19 (1893): 24.
(35) McClelland, quoted in Stebbing, History, 251 (emphasis in original).
(36) Ibid., 252, 255.
(37) "Scientific Forestry" Indian Forester 33 (1907): 89; Stebbing, History, 206.
(38) Col. Pearson, "Recollection of the Early Days of the Indian Forest Department, 1858-1864" Indian Forester 29 (1903): 313-19.
(39) Ibid.
(40) Ibid.
(41) "Forest Administration and Revenue Making" Indian Forester 31 (1905): 246.
(42) Tuscan, "Forest Administration in the Central Provinces," Indian Forester 19 (1893): 45, 332.
(43) Ibid.
(44) Sudhir Chandra, "Profiles of the Founders of Indian Forestry Commemorated in Plant Names (1786-1934)," in History of Forestry in India, ed. Ajay S. Rawat (Delhi, 1991), 337-38.
(45) "Grazing and Commutation in the C.P.," Indian Forester 18 (1892): 415; "Grazing in Forest Lands" Indian Forester 26 (1900): 235; "The Effects of Grazing on Forests," Indian Forester 26 (1900): 283; Gem, "A Plea for Protected Forests, Indian Forester 19 (1893): 123-36.
(46) Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India, 81, 82.
(47) Ibid., 78, 80.
(48) Roy Robinson, "Forestry in the British Empire," Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 84 (1936): 795-96.
(49) R. D., "The Forests of Planet Mars," Indian Forester 33 (1907): 725-26.
(50) Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle book (Oxford, 1987), 327.
(51) Ibid.
(52) Ibid., 344.
(53) Ibid.
(54) Ibid., 343.
(55) Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" London Times, 4 February 1899, 26, 221; New York Tribune, 5 February 1899.
Gregory Barton is an assistant professor of history at the University of Redlands.
Gregory Barton traces the development of environmental policies in nineteenth-century British India, showing that these paternalist, and oft-criticized, strategies for resource management became the model for conservation efforts worldwide.