[extract …] As a revolution in urban governance swept Britain from the 1840s onward, a revolution in water supply and drainage infrastructure followed. The apogee of that movement was a water supply system called the gravitation scheme that reforming municipalities aspired to build. It entailed drastically reshaping landscapes in the hinterlands of cities by damming rivers, raising lakes, or flooding valleys and then piping water under pressure to sometimes distant cities; it also, promoters hoped, would reform urban environments and societies at the same time. Between 1840 and the end of the century, engineers in Britain executed it approximately one hundred times, but the gravitation scheme had a life beyond the bounds of Britain. In the second half of the nineteenth century, engineers—usually the very same individuals who had carried them out in Britain— introduced the scheme to cities such as Bombay, Colombo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. There, the gravitation scheme also had a transformative influence; it was a project of environmental and technical change that helped to solidify the modernizing colonial state.

This water system was a practical solution to the challenge of providing growing urban populations in Britain with water, but it represented more than that to the advocates of improvement in cities such as Bradford, Glasgow, and Manchester. For them, the design was ideally suited to accomplish goals that combined physical and moral amelioration. In their eyes, it was the best technology for keeping cities flush with water for drinking and bearing away human and industrial poisons, and because it was presumed to be the best method for introducing water to all homes in all corners of the city, they believed that it was the best way to induce working-class families—who they imagined were averse to water use—to use it for drinking (as an alternative to alcohol) and for eliminating demoralizing grime. In other words, only if the poor would adopt more water usage could the warrens of the cities be rid of environmental and moral filth. In the empire, those who promoted the gravitation scheme were guided by much the same motivations, but there, the targets of water reform were chiefly identified by race rather than class.

Confident that they were spreading enlightenment and civilization, colonial officials and engineers sought to impose this technological-environmental system on the landscapes of the empire. These efforts had long-standing consequences for both environmental and social regimes. On the subcontinent, and in Sri Lanka, Japan, and China, engineers diverted rivers, created lakes, drowned villages, and dislodged farmers in order to provide sometimes distant cities with water. The projects linked this environmental change in the hinterlands to social change in the cities. The new colonial water supplies often replaced traditional water systems; where control over water sources was formerly decentralized, water systems became more and more centralized. “Official” water sources proliferated, along with official instruction to use them.1

• 1. Christopher Hamlin has shown that, at the beginning of the sanitary and water reform movement, sanitarians such as Edwin Chadwick fought and won contests to determine how “improvement” was to be defined and achieved; that is, it was decided to treat the side effects of poverty, poisonous by-products that threatened the British workforce and threatened to expand into middle-class circles, instead of the root causes of poverty and disease. Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in an Age of Chadwick, Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge, 1998).