Learning Objective: Students will be informed about the enriched history of Bengal and its impact in international trade and development.

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF
ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS AND DEVELOPMENT
POLICIES
Preeti Kana Sikder
Assistant Professor, Department of Law & Justice

3. Features of the Bengal Delta
•The Bengal delta is open to the immense expanse of the
Indian Ocean
•It also includes an enormous hinterland (uncharted areas
beyond a coastal district or a river's banks)
•This delta has been integrated into networks of long
distance trade, pilgrimage, political alliance, cultural
exchange and travel.

4. Features of the Bengal Delta
•People and goods from various areas, such as: landlocked
Ganges plains, Tibet, Nepal and the Brahmaputra valley
could be sent only through this delta.
•On the other hand, many traders, Buddhist pilgrims,
political emissaries and adventurers would take this path
to visit those aforementioned areas.
•As a result, the Bengal Delta has been known to serve as ‘a
gateway to the wider world.’

5. Features of the Bengal Delta
• The coastal waterways of Bengal became a traffic hub with
enormous geographical reach.
• The famous Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah visited the Bengal
Delta through this trade route.
• Many South East Asians, North Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Arabs,
Central Asians, Persians, Ethiopians and Tibetans regularly came
through this route.
• The urban centres of Bengal Delta became nodes (a point in a network
at which pathways intersect) in far flung trade networks.
• These urban centres thrived on the resources of the hinterland,
maritime links and local produce.

6. The Flourishing
trade centre
Silver Drachma
(Coin made in
Greece) of 300 BCE
was found in
Dhaka

7. The FlourishingTrade Centre
•There were two major trade routes that coastal vessels
could use safely.
•From the Bengal delta, the first route steered west,
following the coast of India to Sri Lanka, and from there
to the Maldives, western India, Eastern Africa, Arabia
and the Mediterranean.
•The other maritime route went east, following the
coasts of Arakan and Burma and then on to south-east
and east Asia.

8. The FlourishingTrade Centre
•The most important ancient port controlling this route
was known as Samandar or Sattigaon, identical with
Chittagong.
• There were many other ports of importance, long
forgotten.
• A tenth-century inscription suggests that the town of
Savar derives its name from its role as a port with
warehousing facilities.

9. Textile Industry in Ancient Bengal
• Bengal’s textile industry was based on cotton cultivation and
silkworm rearing
• This industry was scattered throughout the rural areas because
water routes made it cheap to transport the finished product from
weaving villages to the urban markets.
• In 1586, a European visitor judged the fine cotton fabrics made in
Sonargaon, near Dhaka, to be the best in the whole of India.
• Such luxury cotton and silk textiles were traded to elite markets of
various countries
• These items were relatively cheap due to Bengal’s abundant and
highly skilled labour

10. Entry of the Newcomers
• Many traders from different parts of Europe were attracted by the
opportunities of the Bengal Delta.
• Following long established routes around Africa, newcomers from far
north-west, especially Portuguese traders, started to enter the cities of
Bengal after 1500.
• The inhabitants of the delta observed the European traders carefully and,
whenever possible, used them to their own advantage. Sometimes the
newcomers appeared as dangerous and predatory and sometimes as
convenient partners in trade.
• The British colonisers wanted more than just to extract Bengal’s riches. It
was their ambition to transform Bengal’s economy to make it yield them
much more income.

11. COLONIALISM
the control or governing influence of a nation over another
dependent country, territory, or people.

13. W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, Vol I, The
Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient
Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore, 1868
“All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The
husbandman sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture;
they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till
at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of
trees and the grass of the field; and in June, 1770, the Resident at the
Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead.
Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches
poured into the great cities. At an early period of the year pestilence had
broken out. In March we find small-pox at Murshidabad…the streets
were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and the dead.”

14. W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, Vol I, The
Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient
Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore, 1868
“Internment could not do its work quick enough; even the dogs and
jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish
their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering
corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens…In 1770, the
rainy season brought relief, and before the end of September the
province reaped an abundant harvest.
But the relief came too late to avert depopulation. Starving and
shelterless crowds crawled despairingly from one deserted village to
another in a vain search for food, or a resting place in which to hide
themselves from the rain.”

15. W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, Vol I, The
Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient
Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore, 1868
“The epidemics incident to the season were thus spread over the whole
country; and, until the close of the year, disease continued so prevalent
as to form a subject of communication from the government in Bengal
to the Court of Directors [in London].
Millions of famished wretches died in the struggle to live through the
few intervening weeks that separated them from the harvest, their last
gaze being probably fixed on the densely-covered fields that would
ripen only a little too late for them.”

16. “Chhiyattarer
Manbantar”
The early introduction of a system of increased tax collection
proved to be calamitous in the uncertain natural conditions of
Bengal

17. Experimental Authoritarian Rule
•At first, the British introduced a system of increased tax
collection.
•They applied this system rigidly despite a depletion of
people’s incomes as a result of drought and then floods in
1769-70.
•Together with unchecked profiteering in the food-grain
markets, this led to intense suffering and an epic famine
which is still remembered as the ‘Great Famine of 1176’
•One third of the Bengal’s population perished due to this
unconscionable debacle (a failure)

18. Experimental Authoritarian Rule
•In 1790, they introduced a new system of land taxation
termed as ‘the permanent settlement’.
•The British claimed the ultimate property rights of all land
in Bengal, but they made a deal with the zaminders and
made them the de facto (in fact) landowners fixing the tax
demand in perpetuity.
•The state would not enhance the rate in future. In return,
the zaminders were bound to pay their taxes with
clockwork punctuality on pain of their land being auctioned
off

19. Experimental Authoritarian Rule
• To earn money in easy way, these zaminders started to increase
rents to get more money for the peasantry and force tenants to
pay contributions to events in own families.
• As the peasantry were denied any property right in land, they
suffered severely
• This system survived with modifications till the 1950s and
moulded social and economic relations in the delta to such an
extent that contemporary Bangladesh cannot be understood
without reference to it.

20. Experimental Authoritarian Rule
•A second major change in the colonial period was the
introduction of large scale export oriented cash cropping
•Though cash cropping was already being carried out in
Bengal, the British businessmen started developing a
system that put the farmers in a weak position as they
were forced to produce products out of their choice
•Colonial cash cropping led to a new regional
specialisation of the Bengal economy.
•Jute and Indigo were being produced in a large amount

21. IMPACT OFTHE BRITISH
COLONY
The colonial framework proved long-lived: despite
turbulent state formation since British times, it
remains clearly visible in Bangladesh’s judicial,
educational, health, engineering and military
institutions today

22. Post-British Impact
• In the colonial period, the agrarian economy underwent
important change.
• As Eastern Bengal’s industrial exports declined, its agrarian
exports expanded by means of a steady expansion of cultivated
area rather than improved technology or higher productivity.
• Landlords were happy to appropriate agrarian surpluses to
sustain their comfortable lifestyle but they did not invest in
agriculture.
• Cultivators, who often had to support several layers of landlords,
were unable to introduce new technology as improved seeds,
commercial fertilisers, irrigation or better implements.

23. HORIZONTAL
EXPANSION
The agrarian production grew because cultivators brought more and more
land under the plough. But by the end of nineteenth century, the extension
of cultivation reached its natural limits.