The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [167]
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.85
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.86
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