Andrew Roberts: The British in India did build huge waterways and arguing otherwise is just bad history

Lord Roberts is the author of ‘Churchill: Walking with Destiny’

In his attack on Sir Niall Ferguson, Lord Biggar and me here on Conservative Home  – the distinguished biochemist Terence Kealey makes the remarkable claim that the British Empire in India ‘built too few waterways because they would not be of importance to British businesspeople: they would be of importance only to ordinary Indians, in whom the British were insufficiently invested.

The civil servants of the Raj—aware of the taxes they raised on the peasantry—would have lobbied for agricultural irrigation, but they would have been sidelined by British plutocrats looking for quicker and more private bucks.

It surely follows, therefore, that if it can be proved that the British Raj did indeed build vast and extensive waterways for irrigation, then the British Empire can’t have been quite the evil plutocratic enterprise that Prof Kealey depicts.

For that is, of course, exactly what happened.

The canals and waterways built by the British in India were easily the most extensive in the world at the time, far larger than those of contemporary America, Russia, any European country including Holland, larger than anywhere in Africa or elsewhere in Asia, dwarfing the Suez and Panama canals by comparison. Hilariously, Prof Kealey, by attempting to stray into the area of history, has made the best possible argument he could for the British Raj.

In his highly readable and comprehensive book The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise, Kartar Lalvani devotes a chapter to the great British waterways there, such as the Cochrane Canal from Pulicat Lake to Madras which was constructed with private capital from those evil plutocrats who Prof. Kealey so despises. In 1834 the British repaired the Grand Anicut dam which under the Mughals had silted up to a trickle, adding a quarter of a million acres of arable land and bringing urgent famine relief.

Somehow Prof Kealey must also have failed to notice the work British engineers did building the Godavari Delta, the Kistna Canal, the Fuleli Canal in Sind, the East Coast and Buckingham Canals, the twenty thousand miles of canals and distributaries criss-crossing western Bengal and Bihar, the East and West Jumna Canals (which the Mughals had allowed to collapse), the vast Sutlej Valley Project Canals serving the princely states of Bahawalpur and Bikaner,  the Ganges Canal, the Sirhind Canal, the 1,231 wells installed in Nagpur during the 1820s, and the Cauvery-Mettur Project. Prof Kealey has also managed to ignore the Periyar Dam and Canal on the Vaigai River, and the Agra Canal opened in 1873.

If Professor Kealey had looked up from his test tubes and not parroted whatever anti-British tripe had first come into his head, secure in the knowledge that the zeitgeist is so with him that any libel against the British Empire is encouraged, he might have at least noticed that by 1942 there were 57 million acres of irrigated land in British India, of which 32 million was irrigated from public works. He might have also noticed that experts from all over the world, such as the US Geological Survey, were sent to India to study how British-engineer waterworks had, in Lalvani’s words, ‘saved so many from famine and brought renewed abundance and trade to life across India’. Writing as recently as 2016, Lalvani correctly concluded that, ‘Today, water management remains one of the testament to British rule in India.’

Although the Mughals did build some important waterways, most water-borne trade of consequence was conined to the coastline under their rule. With the exception of the Ganges, Hoogly, Indus and a very few other large ones, relatively little use was made of rivers before the arrival of the British. As for India’s canals and irrigation projects, the vast majority were conceived, financed and engineered (often by serving or former Royal Engineers officers) by the British, though of course they were actually dug through the sweat of paid Indian labour.

Far from projects being ‘sidelined’ by ‘plutocrats’ –  a leftie word for successful capitalists – it was usually the London Stock Exchange that provided at least the initial working capital for such modern wonders of the world as the extensive irrigation canals that were built in the Indus Valley by the Indian Basin Valley Project and in the Ganges-Yamuna plains to support agriculture and trade. Between 1885 and 1940 over a million people went to live in the western Punjab, once an arid area but thanks to the Punjab Canal Colonies irrigation systems now able to grow wheat, cotton and sugar. When the Ganges Canal was completed in 1854, bringing irrigation to Uttar Pradesh, it was the largest and most expensive man-made waterway in the world, according to the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Perhaps Professor Kealey knows better than the Institution of Civil Engineers about civil engineering, just as he obviously thinks he knows better than Niall Ferguson, Nigel Biggar and me about history, but when he cities the ultranationalist Indian populist politician Shashi Tharoor to support his case – even describing him as ‘an intellectual’ – and there Kealey frankly makes a fool of himself. Tharoor’s ideology, methodology and economic data have been comprehensively exploded by genuine intellectuals such as Prof Tirthankar Roy of the LSE and the late Zareer Masani.

The British Empire, Prof Kealey states, cannot have been a good thing because the British did not build waterways, and he even provides as conspiracy theory about plutocrats and civil servants for why they supposedly didn’t. In fact, however, they built easily the most extensive waterways in the world at that time. Out of his own mouth, therefore, through his own invincible ignorance of matters outside his biochemical expertise, the professor has managed to come up with a reason to praise the British Raj, even though he was trying to bury it.