The Dutch took action. As early as 1832 they built two long piers, but these failed to solve the problem, and finally they had to build a whole new port to serve Jakarta, at Tandjung Priok, 10 km from the capital. This was done in the 1880s. The work included a rail link to Jakarta, an inner harbour, and an outer harbour with two heads each 1,850 metres long, and with an entrance of 125 metres. The object was to enable the Dutch to compete with Singapore, and for a while this was successful. However, the latter was advantaged by a good natural harbour and being a free port for nearly all imports. The late nineteenth century tin and rubber
boom in Malaya provided another boost, so that while Jakarta did well in trade within the Malay world, Singapore remained the major international blue water port.
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Moving south, the rise of Fremantle provides a good illustration of how harbour works could make a port, and undo a competitor. Fremantle was the port of Perth, the capital of the new, in 1829, colony of western Australia. However, the port had virtually no natural harbour, and was blocked by a bar, so the mail steamers went on around to Albany from their beginning in 1852 and for 30 years thereafter. The powerful merchants and politicians of Perth found this unsatisfactory. Fremantle's first jetty, built in 1873, was 420 metres long, and ten years later this was extended to 1,150 metres. By the end of the century a fine man-made inner harbour was ready, and Albany was immediately left to sink into insignificance.
Turning Chennai into a viable port was one of the great achievements of British colonial engineering. But it took a very long time! Plans to build an artificial harbour were approved in 1872, and work began five years later in the form of two huge breakwaters. Before they were finished they were damaged by a cyclone, and this part of the project was only completed in 1895. Even then there were problems, one being that the entrance silted up at the rate of one foot a year. Worse, it soon turned out that the breakwaters had been badly designed: they had to be totally remodelled between 1906 and 1912. Then another cyclone struck in 1916, which washed away the end of the sheltering arm, the lighthouse, and 8,000 tons of rock. The engineering part of turning Chennai into a decent port was completed only in 1925.
A good port needs adequate facilities for clearing cargoes and passengers on shore, and again it took a long time to arrange this in Chennai. Around the end of the century an engineer's report complained that
Between high-water mark and the streets of the town of Madras there were to be found a few confused and unregulated railway sidings and two or three exiguous sheds. The beach was to be seen at all times littered with timber, coal, railway materials, general cargo, machinery, liquors, etc., all in dire confusion. Every packet of dutiable goods landed along the beach, unless too big to be handled, was obliged to be carried on men's heads to the Government Customs House across the street, while goods arriving over the old screwpile pier had to be pushed to the same Customs House on lorries. The entire dutiable trade of Madras had to pass in, and the empty lorries pass out, through one 10-foot Custom House gateway. The result was that it was no uncommon thing for a consignee not to get his packages under several weeks or even months. Machinery and railway packages used to be piled up in stacks, sometimes three or four deep, on the beach, and it was constantly happening that, before the cargo of one vessel could be delivered to waiting consignees, that of another had perforce, for want of sidings, to be dumped on top of it. In fact, the arrangements were about as bad as they could be.
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So on land also a complete remodelling had to be done, and this was completed between 1906 and 1912.
Colombo provides an example quite analogous to Fremantle. At first the steamers bound for Australia and Singapore called at Galle, which had a better natural harbour. Colombo handled Sri Lanka's export and import trade, in sailing ships. However, Galle soon was unable to service larger steamers, and the government decided that Colombo was to be turned into the major port in Sri Lanka. There were obvious reasons to do this: it was the capital, and it had much better access to the plantations which developed in the interior in the second half of the nineteenth century. More generally, it actually was much better located than was its rival, Mumbai, to service ships going from the Red Sea to southeast Asia, the Bay of Bengal, or Australia. By the 1880s Colombo had been provided with a basin of 203 hectares of sheltered water up to ten metres deep, which could take twenty-five of the largest steamers at the same time. In the 1890s more breakwaters, a fishery harbour and a coaling depot with eighteen jetties were completed. The port flourished from the early 1880s to the 1920s because, in terms of our previous discussion, it had both a hinterland and a foreland. The plantations provided large exports: first cinnamon, then coffee from the 1840s, tea from the 1890s, and early in the twentieth century coconut and rubber were added. In 1910 Colombo was the seventh port in the world in terms of tonnage entering.
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Karachi constitutes perhaps the best example of all of a port created to serve new, imperial, needs. There had been minor ports around the estuary of the Indus for centuries, but they were of little importance, and in the nineteenth century were bypassed in favour of Mumbai. In 1839, when the British annexed Karachi, it had a population of a mere 15,000. It then boomed as the American Civil War opened a large new market for Indian cotton. Between 1857–58 and 1863–64 the value of its trade increased threefold. Once American raw cotton production began again Karachi slumped. However, the British were developing vast, fertile, new tracts in the Canal Colonies of the Punjab, and in 1878 opened a rail link from there to Karachi. Trade boomed again. From a value of Rs 40 million in 1867–68 it rose to Rs 110 million in 1882–83 and 330 million in 1904–05. All this was made possible by large scale engineering to turn a poor harbour into a good one. A mole, a breakwater, a groyne, piers, berths and wharves were all built and the harbour entrance was deepened.
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Dredging, mundane though it may seem, was one of the great underpinnings of the development of these ports. By 1914 the lagoon at Cochin was nearly inaccessible to modern ships. In the 1920s the British dredged a channel 5 km long, 135 metres wide, and 11 metres deep, and the fill created Willingdon Island, still to be seen in the harbour. Cochin prospered as a result. So also for Basra, which was captured by the British in 1914. Army engineers immediately constructed quays and a railway yard, and brought in modern cranes. After the war Iraq became a Mandate, and began to export oil. To facilitate this the Shatt al Arab was dredged. Previously this waterway was so shallow that vessels had to load 80 or even 160 km away at sea. Dredging meant that ships up to 9 metres draught could reach Basra. In the case of
Mumbai it was not a matter so much of creating a harbour, for the port has a fine natural one, but rather of creating land. Mumbai was originally seven islands, separated at high tide and joined by mud flats at low. The history of the town is a history of reclamation, of the city being invented from marshes, salt flats, isolated islands and even open sea.
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Most of these ports were creations
de novo
of the imperial powers, and especially of the British. True that in many of these locations there had been minor ports before, but they were totally transformed by the west. When an existing port was redone to produce one adequate for the needs of the steamers, a pronounced dualism often resulted, as in Colombo. So also in Aden, where the modern steamer port is 6 km from the traditional dhow harbour at Ma'alla. Mombasa was a very old port, but was totally transformed from the end of the nineteenth century by the British. It had essentially been a trans-shipment port, but the British created for it a hinterland. This was done by building a rail line, beginning in 1896, far inland to Lake Victoria and later to Kampala. Originally undertaken for strategic reasons, to counter any threat from French or German rival imperialism before World War I, the rail subsequently enabled Mombasa to develop as the main port in East Africa. In 1960 Mombasa had 70 per cent of all land–sea transfers in the region. Here again however a pronounced dualism resulted. The old dhow harbour was left to whither, an anachronism so far as the colonial rulers were concerned, and a new port, Kilindini, created which could accommodate steamers and which linked in with the British dominated central business district in town.
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The rise of Mombasa meant that other East African ports were left to fall into insignificance, at least in term of being linked in to blue water routes. This happened all over the Indian Ocean as imperial concerns dictated that one port be privileged at the expense of another. Fremantle rose, Albany fell; Colombo triumphed over Galle; Mumbai over Surat; Chennai over a host of traditional ports in Coromandel; Singapore over Melaka; Jakarta over other ports in Java. In South Africa Durban superseded Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London. It had 52 per cent of landed cargo in all South Africa in 1918.
There are important differences in the roles of these colonial port cities as compared with earlier times. We have written extensively about port cities in the pre-colonial period, and stressed that when they prospered they did so partly because of location, partly because some could draw on productive hinterlands, but mostly because merchants knew they would be treated fairly. The early western port cities often also did well for these same reasons. In the earlier period they had extensive forelands, going even to East Asia and to Europe, and they drew products from the interior. The crucial change came when the Europeans did not just trade with the interior, but rather began to control production there, and finally conquer the inland. The great example obviously is India. The port cities in the colonial era were different, as for the first time their influence was turned in on the land, rather than out to the Indian Ocean. In landed terms they became the entry points for industrial products from the west, and exit points for raw materials from the colonies. In maritime terms, as Broeze and his colleagues
put it, they 'have been the gateways into this maritime world as well as the nodal points of the interlocking system that comprises it.'
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And they were totally imperial creations. The engineering works were directed by westerners, and financed by loans from Europe which paid good rates of interest to western investors guaranteed, just like the analogous railways, by colonial revenues. In terms of opportunities for investment, or encouraging the acquisition of new technological skills, there were no backward linkages to the countries in which they were located; in these areas they were colonial enclaves. They were then in several aspects central parts of the process which incorporated and subordinated the colonies to the metropole.
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It was not however just a matter of the west being able to establish a port wherever they wanted; nor could they always build their ports in the best harbours or places with favourable geographies. Access to the foreland, and to the hinterland, dictated development as much as did imperial decisions; the two went hand in hand. Kolkata provides the best example. We have noted how difficult it was and is to access this delta port. It is a very difficult 80 miles from the sea, and has an intimidating tidal range of 22 feet. Yet the fact that the city was essentially built on silt provides an explanation for why it had to be where it was. Silt produces very fertile agricultural lands which fed the city. The main export in the nineteenth century, jute, grows on silt. The maze of waterways were a hazard to navigation certainly, yet they also provided low-cost access to a vast riparian hinterland.
The pattern in the nineteenth century is mixed indeed. The broad trend is one where successful competition with the imperial powers became more and more difficult, and local seafarers were reduced to operating in the interstices of their system, rather than competing with them in areas in which the imperial power took an interest. The fate of Indian shipping and Indian shipbuilding provides an instructive example. The famous Parsi Wadia family established a fine shipyard in Mumbai. Between 1736 and 1821 they built 159 ships of over 100 tons, and 15 of them were sizeable ships of over 1,000 tons. Some were used by the Royal Navy: Codrington's flag ship at Navarino, the
Asia
, was built by the Wadias.
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In 1813 they built the
Cornwallis
, 1,767 tons and 74 guns, and in 1821 the largest, the
Ganges
, 2,284 tons and 84 guns. This indigenous enterprise declined when steam came in. Steam ships and tugs were assembled from prefabricated parts brought from England. However, British dominance, while largely a result of technological advances, also had a pronounced political underpinning. British shipbuilders gave themselves a pronounced advantage even before iron and steam. The Registry Act of 1815 restricted entry of Indian sailors and Indian-made ships. It imposed an extra 15 per cent duty on goods imported on Indian-built ships, and three-quarters of the crew must be British, or the ship would be forfeit.
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There was a strategic dimension here: it was seen as essential that Britain continue to have a reserve of trained sailors in the merchant marine who could transfer to the navy in time of war.
As the century advanced Indian shipping declined, thanks again to political factors as much as technological: after all, Indians could have hired expertise if they lacked it themselves. However, the education the British provided in India was
oriented to produce clerks, not engineers. We have already described in detail the subsidies and other patronage which P&O and BI enjoyed, which was not available to Indian competitors. If an Indian rival did appear, they would be subjected to a fierce rate war until they gave in. Similarly, the conference system, which regulated competition, and discouraged the entry of newcomers, was not available to India as it was not an independent country.