CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
Radio 4 is in full whimsy this morning. There was just a half-hour programme in the series "The Long View" recorded at the South London Botanical Institute (in Norwood Road).
The programme is here BBC Radio 4 - The Long View, 14/03/2017
Apparently the British East India Company constructed a wall across India to prevent smuggling. Well not a wall actually - more an impenetrable hedge. Compare and contrast with Donald Trump - costs, estimated time, availability of labour etc etc
A summary of the issues is here, though the BBC programme dealt more with the botanics than the politics:
British colonial history tells many remarkable tales, none more so than the story of the Great Hedge of India. This relatively unknown story was rediscovered recently by author, Roy Moxham. He tells of a botanical and architectural structure, an impenetrable 8ft high hedge, 1500 miles long, that stretched across Central India. How is it that a wall, comparable to The Great Wall of China, has completely vanished from the story of the British Raj? And what relevance does it have to bordering today?
A map of the inland Customs Line including the Great Hedge
In 19th Century India, one resource was crucial: salt. In the heat of India an adult was thought to require an ounce of salt a day. Whilst the region of East India possessed large deposits of salt in salt-bearing soils, salt lakes and rock-salt, the expense of extracting from these sources and shipping them to Bengal and East India were very high. Therefore, Bengal became dependent on large salt deposits in the so-called ‘Salt Range of the Punjab’. A number of custom houses were established in Bengal in 1803 to prevent the smuggling of salt from the Punjab to British controlled India in the East. As trafficking and smuggling became rife, the East India Company, perceiving a security threat to their territory, linked many of these custom houses together. They made a barrier, mainly consisting of dead thorny material such as the Indian Plum. This eventually evolved, growing into a living hedge that became known at the ‘Great Hedge of India’.
The Great Hedge of India, was part of the Inland Customs Line, which at its peak in the 1870s, was 2500 miles long. It ran from the Punjab in the northwest all the way to the state of Orissa in the southeast. To put this to scale, it is the equivalent of a continuous barrier running from London to Constantinople. This hedge was nowhere less than 8 feet high and 4 feet thick. In fact, in some places it was 12 feet high and 14 feet thick. The Commissioner of Inland Customs at the time, Allan Octavian Hume, was so impressed by this piece of botanical architecture that he described it as “utterly impassable to man or beast”. This hedge was supported by a vast government department, the largest in the Raj, with 12,000 guards patrolling its edges. The brutal physicality of this hedge was combined with huge tax levies on salt within British occupied India. It would need two month’s income of an average farm worker to pay for a modest year’s supply. Whilst one can only speculate at the social impacts of such an extortionate tax, it has been estimated that millions of people died as a result of this levy through shortages of salt. It seems unfathomable that such a vast colonial project can appear to vanish from the collective consciousness of Indian and British history.
(From Oliver Dixon - Royal Holloway College)
The programme is here BBC Radio 4 - The Long View, 14/03/2017
Apparently the British East India Company constructed a wall across India to prevent smuggling. Well not a wall actually - more an impenetrable hedge. Compare and contrast with Donald Trump - costs, estimated time, availability of labour etc etc
A summary of the issues is here, though the BBC programme dealt more with the botanics than the politics:
British colonial history tells many remarkable tales, none more so than the story of the Great Hedge of India. This relatively unknown story was rediscovered recently by author, Roy Moxham. He tells of a botanical and architectural structure, an impenetrable 8ft high hedge, 1500 miles long, that stretched across Central India. How is it that a wall, comparable to The Great Wall of China, has completely vanished from the story of the British Raj? And what relevance does it have to bordering today?
A map of the inland Customs Line including the Great Hedge
In 19th Century India, one resource was crucial: salt. In the heat of India an adult was thought to require an ounce of salt a day. Whilst the region of East India possessed large deposits of salt in salt-bearing soils, salt lakes and rock-salt, the expense of extracting from these sources and shipping them to Bengal and East India were very high. Therefore, Bengal became dependent on large salt deposits in the so-called ‘Salt Range of the Punjab’. A number of custom houses were established in Bengal in 1803 to prevent the smuggling of salt from the Punjab to British controlled India in the East. As trafficking and smuggling became rife, the East India Company, perceiving a security threat to their territory, linked many of these custom houses together. They made a barrier, mainly consisting of dead thorny material such as the Indian Plum. This eventually evolved, growing into a living hedge that became known at the ‘Great Hedge of India’.
The Great Hedge of India, was part of the Inland Customs Line, which at its peak in the 1870s, was 2500 miles long. It ran from the Punjab in the northwest all the way to the state of Orissa in the southeast. To put this to scale, it is the equivalent of a continuous barrier running from London to Constantinople. This hedge was nowhere less than 8 feet high and 4 feet thick. In fact, in some places it was 12 feet high and 14 feet thick. The Commissioner of Inland Customs at the time, Allan Octavian Hume, was so impressed by this piece of botanical architecture that he described it as “utterly impassable to man or beast”. This hedge was supported by a vast government department, the largest in the Raj, with 12,000 guards patrolling its edges. The brutal physicality of this hedge was combined with huge tax levies on salt within British occupied India. It would need two month’s income of an average farm worker to pay for a modest year’s supply. Whilst one can only speculate at the social impacts of such an extortionate tax, it has been estimated that millions of people died as a result of this levy through shortages of salt. It seems unfathomable that such a vast colonial project can appear to vanish from the collective consciousness of Indian and British history.
(From Oliver Dixon - Royal Holloway College)
