Reclaimed Lands: Soil, Sea, and Speculation in Colonial Bombay
 
Mumbai is the current site of ongoing climate disasters. The city is also the product of prolonged land reclamations into the sea that began as part of the colonial project of landscape transformations in the seventeenth century. The speculative and infrastructural act of creating measurable and exploitable land from the sea is embedded in the genealogy of the island city. Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995) was created from the sea by reclaiming land that bridged several islands in an archipelago. These reclamation activities followed a colonial vision of contiguous and measurable territory that legitimized the British and East India Company's presence in India. This book-length research excavates the histories of reclaimed lands in colonial Bombay. The book traces the transformations integral to reclaiming land from the sea—shallow seas became wastelands through the legal doctrine of terra nuillis, then developable plots and free land for colonial infrastructures. These transformations were not clean and linear. They were overlapping processes that involved labor, capital, environmental destruction, legal negotiations, colonial bureaucratic and financial innovations, and local entrepreneurship. By tracing the histories of colonial Bombay's reclaimed lands, the book situates contemporary Mumbai's sinking coasts and its insatiable need for sea-facing land and infrastructure into a longer historical arc traversing centuries of reclamation activities.