Broken Ground: Earthquakes, Colonialism and Nationalism in South Asia, c. 1900-1960

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This project will examine the relationship between earthquakes, colonialism and nationalism in South Asia over a 60-year period. It will answer a key question in disaster risk reduction (DRR) studies: how far do natural disasters cause or catalyse political and social change? While some scholars recognise that vulnerability to disasters results from historical processes such as economic marginalisation, attempts to understand their political impacts are hampered by the relatively short timeframes that DRR studies employs (up to ~10 years). This presents an opportunity for historical research on natural disasters such as earthquakes, which have occurred in the more distant past. I will develop long-term perspectives on the local and national political developments that earthquakes interrupted (or did not interrupt); and on earthquakes' continuing repercussions. I will therefore transform the DRR debate over disasters' political impacts while shedding new light on human interaction with extreme natural processes, a growing concern in environmental history.I will investigate three earthquakes that occurred during the early 1930s in the British Empire in South Asia: in Pyu, Burma (Myanmar), 1930; in Bihar (India) and Nepal, 1934; and Quetta (India, later Pakistan), 1935. Each earthquake was large and deadly, and all took place during a time of increasing nationalist resistance to British rule. They are apt for analysis because they shared a broad regional political context, while affecting different physical and social landscapes. A study of the three together will yield insights into the nuanced temporal and spatial development of earthquake politics, with broader intellectual ramifications than existing earthquake histories, which address single earthquakes in isolation.I will ask three linked research questions:1. Whom (and where) did the earthquakes affect, to what extent, and why?2. What impacts did the earthquakes, and reconstruction activities, have on political developments at local, regional and 'national' scales?3. To what extent did the physical effects of the earthquakes (such as destruction of communications infrastructure or causing rivers to change course) alter the geographical basis of colonial rule?The project provides a new window onto important issues for imperial historians (the colonial state and nationalism), environmental historians (landscapes' agency), and decolonisation historians (transitions from colonial to postcolonial rule). I will be the first to address political change in historical disaster contexts while examining ongoing interactions between humans and the environment in South Asia.I, with the PDRA, will conduct longitudinal studies of the affected regions. The timeframe will extend from c. 1900 to c. 1960 (when archival material for postcolonial South Asia becomes scarce), analysing a ~30-year period each side of the earthquakes. I will therefore place the earthquakes among the major transitions that accompanied the growth of anticolonial nationalism and decolonisation in South Asia. We will conduct archival research in the UK, India, Nepal, Myanmar and Pakistan; and produce maps of earthquake damage and reconstruction activities, highlighting the disasters' spatial politics.We will disseminate our findings to scholars through several major publications. I will publish a monograph with a leading university press and an article in a leading DRR journal. The PDRA will publish an article in a major peer-reviewed journal. I will disseminate the research to non-academic stakeholders through a Policy Brief (a short summary of the research findings, aimed at policy makers) and a Policy Workshop in London.