The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

Around this time, several steam engines were also built in Calcutta. The skills for the making and maintenance of these machines were abundantly available in and around the city. A historian of Indian steamships notes, ‘the Ganges valley villages were teeming with men whose skills in their own traditional technology were roughly similar to those needed to keep a steam flotilla in service’. This anticipated an important but little-noticed aspect of the age of steam: it was India that provided much of the manpower for the boiler rooms of the world’s steam-powered merchant fleets. Already in the early 1820s, businessmen in India, foreign and local, had become keenly interested in the possibility of a regular steamer service between England and India. Since no coal-fuelled vessel had yet made that journey, a conglomerate of wealthy men—a group that included the Nawab of Awadh—announced a prize of 10,000 pounds sterling for the first steamship to complete the voyage in less than seventy days. The challenge was taken up by a group of investors in England and a side-wheeled steamship called Enterprise (a name that recurs often among early steamships) was built at Deptford at a cost of 43,000 pounds sterling. The Enterprise left Falmouth on 16 August 1825, and arrived in Calcutta on 7 December, after a voyage of 114 days. Even though the steamer had not met the specified time limit, the committee decided to award the owners a substantial sum of money in recognition of the historic...