This essay on the connections between mangroves and empire is the ninth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey
In December 1928, Benito Mussolini broke ground—quite literally—on a massive development project. He targeted the “death inducing swamps” of the Pontine Marshes, the substantial wetland region on Rome’s southern edges. Mussolini sought to remake these into “New Town” settlements whose residents would model ideal standards of productivity. Having coined the term “fascist” a decade earlier, the Italian prime minister now sought to enforce order amidst these swamps. He also aimed to purify urban areas through a resettlement process described as sventramento (disembowelment). Seemingly idle or excess urban residents would be encouraged to relocate to the newly-ordained model towns of the marshes.
Mussolini’s language of “disembowelment” ascribed qualities of the human body to the landscape. This ominous medical language of bodily mutilation, used in the context of eliminating wetlands, is rehearsed elsewhere on the globe at that same time. Scholar Archie Davis examines how, in the 1930s, administrators in Brazil conducted a “crusade” against settlements in Bahia’s mangrove swamps. They were described as “enemies of life” which “mutilate human energy.” And so, the administration sought to purge the wetlands in a process called aterramento (making of land). By characterizing Brazilian wetlands as a corrupting influence, Brazilian administrators also ascribed qualities of human (im)morality to the landscape.
Sometimes, plants—and the broader local ecologies which they sustain—talk back to empire. By following the rhetorical glorification of borders and the recurring villainization of wetlands, we can perceive a counter-response in the defiant voice of the mangrove. It is a quintessential botanical agent of those places where land and water meet.
A Wetland’s Unruly Possibilities
The colonial making of land occurrs both physically (via flood-control infrastructure) and ontologically (via rhetoric and property laws). This dual making works to bring both material and—allegedly—moral order to wetlands. This almost magical transmutation process has a long history. It extends from the nineteenth-century British corralling of “nuisance swamps” in Bengal and Aotearoa to Brazilian projects of the 1930s.
The shoreline—where land and water are in a kind of dance, receding and expanding with tides and floods, can be awfully hard to administer for extraction.
Imperial discourses have used racializing and medicalizing rhetoric to frame wetlands as agents that disorder “healthy” colonial modernity. In marshes, deltas, mangrove forests, and other fluid ecologies, there may not be such a clear distinction between “land” and “water.” Shorelines might change every year, every month, or even every day depending on floods, tides, and seasons. A shoreline, then, is not necessarily a boundary between land and water, but instead a zone of transition, interface, and exchange.
If an interested party—a nation, an empire—hopes to administer such a place for “productivity,” there are (at least) two challenges. One is physical, as wetlands are fixed with levees, dams, or other material infrastructures. But another challenge is imaginative. This is because wetlands are like a provocation, whose fluctuating shorelines undermine the empire’s claims that borders are definitive.
(Un)Making Borders
Why listen for the voice of the mangrove? Because the maintenance of state power is inseparable from the forced conscription of other-than-human entities, as historian Rohan Deb Roy’s scholarship on “nonhuman empires” and Jonathan Saha’s examinations of “interspecies empire” tell us. State power is built through multispecies entanglements of human labor, animal capital, environmental imaginaries, and the administrative practices which link them all. Beyond the appropriation of plants and animals as physical commodities to be circulated in global markets, this entanglement also involves the harnessing of the visual, literary, and rhetorical representation of plants and animals.
Jeannie Shinozuka examines how turn-of-the-century U.S. media raised alarms about insect “pests” from East Asia. These insects, perceived as a threat to California’s agricultural industry, reflected U.S. anxieties of “alien” immigrants arriving from East Asia at that same time. The monoculture crop—perhaps a stand-in for the nation—was seemingly under threat from unruly entities, both human and other-than-human. This language of contamination from beyond the border, implicating both health and race, demonstrates how the maligning of environments is linked with the maligning of peoples.
Vast monocultures of sugarcane, cotton, and coffee made world(s)-altering impacts on both metropolitan European treasuries and tropical landscapes. As scholar Britt Rusert finds, early Caribbean plantations were laboratories of empire. They were spaces of containment where “the permeability of plantation borders” was policed against the intrusion of “fugitive” influence from surrounding environments. Within these confines, not only could profitable plant cultivars be literally experimented upon, but models of labor coercion and racial hierarchies could also be experimented with and managed for productivity. Ecosystems and people were both corralled.
The continued expansion of similar colonial extraction approaches across the tropics and the planet more broadly, occurring into and beyond the twentieth century, constituted a globalizing of the plantation model.
Yet, wetlands speak to livable possibilities and alternative imaginaries beyond the heavily-policed borders of the plantation.
Bengal’s Vexing Mangroves and British Border-making
British administrations of colonial territories embraced the concept of land improvement into the twentieth century, justifying colonialism as a way of improving the productivity of the land. Colonial property boundaries demarcated these “improved,” pastoral spaces. But the shoreline—where land and water are in a kind of dance, receding and expanding with tides and floods, can be awfully hard to administer for extraction.
The Sundarbans ecoregion is the largest contiguous mangrove forest on the planet, covering about 10,000 square kilometers (including much of Bengal). Scholars Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl describe how the Sundarbans presented “legal vexations” for British administrators since “border-making becomes the necessity” of imposing land ownership in “such amphibious and obtuse terrain.” Among the mangroves, “we are met with the trembling instability of borders.”
How did East India Company administrators account for the obstacle posed by these shorelines?
The Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Act (BADA) of 1825 sought to simplify colonial revenue collection among the dynamic shorelines of wetlands. When seasonally-flooded rivers receded, new accretions of land had taken shape, composed of deposited soils from runoff. BADA designated these new land formations as property of the colonial state. This legal maneuver allowed British power consolidation and the establishment of fixed property.
Inducting unruly ecologies into modernity, the colonial pen and paper, like sorcery, conjured land into being.
Yet, wetlands speak to livable possibilities and alternative imaginaries beyond the heavily-policed borders of the plantation.
Beyond the physical process, this was a matter of imaginative control. As historian Debjani Bhattacharyya describes, “The legal processes through which the mobility of the landscape was accommodated into the architecture of ownership…was as much an infrastructural project as it was an ontological endeavor in producing a dry culture.” Laws established physical property boundaries among wetlands, yet also made claims on how we ought to imagine fixed borders and land-water binaries.
Aotearoa: Health and the British Re-ordering of “Nuisance Swamps”
Mangroves weren’t alone in their vexing defiance. Conifer trees of Aotearoa’s North Island also frustrated British administrators. In Aotearoa, colonial border-makers also sought to reject the “murky, mucky, chaotic and disorderly” lifeways “founded on fluidity and in-between-ness,” instead favoring “the linear geometry” of agronomic landscapes. In this case, “under the guise of public health and progress,” British settlers “set about transforming these ‘waste’ lands into productive farmland.”
Here too, bogs were entangled with concepts of medicine. The Napier Swamp Nuisance Act of 1875 aimed to decontaminate Aotearoa “through strategic interventions to remove and remake wetlands.” The “damp vapour arising” from wetlands, as it was described in local press at that time, was perceived as “highly prejudicial to residents’ health.”
These imaginaries perpetuated the claim that persistent illness and poverty among Maori communities was simply a natural result of environment. For example, prominent settler politician and physician Alfred Newman infamously argued that Maori were “dying out” because of their “evil habit of pitching their dwellings on low-lying swampy ground.”
Victorian-era ideas of class distinction and medical theory thus naturalized Indigenous marginalization and justified wetlands drainage alike.
In Aotearoa, we see the specter of the pest manifest with clarity as a threat entangled with the unproductive reputation of wetlands. As scholar Anna Boswell points out, English author Charles Flinders Hursthouse, similarly invoked such pestilence:
Damp and dripping forests, exhaling pestilent vapours from rank and rotten vegetation, fall before the axe … Fen and march and swamp, the bittern’s dank domain, fertile only in miasma, are drained; and the plough converts them into wholesome plains of fruit, and grain, and grass.
Pestilence is seemingly defeated by the wholesomeness of productive pastures in this imaginary of Aotearoa as a “Britain of the South.”
Recife: Are Mangroves “Enemies of Life” or “The Soul of a City”?
By the 1930s, as the Dairy Board proudly advertised the transformation of Aotearoa into the “Empire’s dairy farm” and Mussolini was fighting the unruly marshes of Italy, the discourses of health, work, nation, and wetland-drainage were also converging in Brazil.
As the Bahian city of Recife became subject to large-scale infrastructure projects, mocambo became a term in nationalist discourses for working-class settlements on the city’s periphery. During the harsh, nationalist rule of the Estado Novo years (1937-1945), Agamenon Magalhães, governor of Bahia, established Liga Social Contra o Mocambo (Social League Against the Mocambo).
The historical legacy of the term mocambo is relevant. During repeated waves of plantation escapes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Black slaves who had fled the planters’ fields founded autonomous settlements known as quilombos. Several prominent quilombos were located in the state of Bahia, along the coast where Portuguese planters had established their sugarcane monoculture. Quilombos were enmeshed in networks with mocambos, a term ascribed to similar bush-camps of runaways in the backlands, like a constellation of refugia.
The term mocambo came to be associated with the image of swamps. And, the mocambos—and, by extension, swamps themselves—were characterized as “repellent, unhygienic, and dangerous.” Moreover, as Davis reminds us, these “were the decades of the embranquecimento [whitening] of the Brazilian population through public policies of immigration, miscegenation, and sterilization.” In Magalhães’s words in 1939: “The idle life [that] … the mocambos provide … It is a life … [that] generates in its breast the venom of larvae …. Enemies of life, as are the mocambos…, where the polluted waters contaminate pure waters.”
Imaginative Power and the Wetland’s Retort
From fascist-administered Rome to Estado Novo-administered Recife, a rhetorical emphasis on both work ethic and the purity of the nation maligns wetlands not merely as physical threats but also as imaginative threats. Magalhães made this connection explicit when he described the mocambo as, “the tomb of a race … a sombre landscape of human misery … which mutilates human energy and annuls work.” Thus, “unhealthy,” “unproductive,” or otherwise resistant ecologies were potential moral corrupters. It wasn’t simply that wetlands constituted a physical threat, via malaria-carrying mosquitoes or difficult-to-traverse mud. Wetlands also seemed capable of provoking something like “degeneracy.”
But if colonial projects can harm wetlands both materially and immaterially, then perhaps wetlands can speak back in both arenas, too.
Colonial administrators were “disconcerted by the strangeness” of “impenetrable swamp-forests” and “monstrously peculiar forms” of unique eco-regions. Thus, the transformative process of colonialism “involves reshaping the threatening, chaotic, destabilizing and alien elements so that the place can be re-born as home: familiar, safe, controlled, and controllable” with “rectangularised” parcels of land.
Wetlands, in other words, do not just confound physical infrastructure. Wetlands destabilize colonial modernity. Even among the earlier administrators of the East India Company, what Ginwala and Ziherl called the “vexations” of the mangroves required a kind of imaginative counter-attack, or what Bhattacharyya called an “ontological endeavour.” Imperial administrators corralled Bengal’s wetlands not merely through material infrastructures like dams and levees, but also through immaterial, imaginative frameworks, which devalued wetlands. In this way, land improvement in Aotearoa was simultaneously “an ideological, material and technical project.”
The consequences of these projects are also much larger than physical changes to the landscape. The consequences of these projects are also much larger than physical changes to the landscape. Davis points to the artists of Brazil, where mangue beat (mangrove beat) musicians of the 1990s put it well: “The fastest way also to obstruct and evacuate the soul of a city like Recife is to kill its rivers and fill up its estuaries.” This echoes in Bengal. Draining the wetlands deprived local peoples of their cultural practices. As such, Bhattacharyya proposes that the history of British wetlands administration in Bengal is a simultaneous “history of forgetting … and because we forget, it is harder for us to imagine alternatives.”
But if colonial projects can harm wetlands both materially and immaterially, then perhaps wetlands can speak back in both arenas, too. By draining wetlands, colonial administrators were insisting upon the legitimacy of their property claims while also insisting upon the legitimacy of their epistemologies. But the river, the swamp, and the mangrove say otherwise; they are living retorts to the claim that borders are permanent.
These nuisance ecologies argue that empire is not inevitable.
Featured image: Cowdie forest on the Wairoa River, Kaipara by Charles Heaphy, 1840.
Iliana Capozzoli is a graduate student in the History program at the University of Montana. She engages with approaches of critical geography and decolonial studies to explore historical geographies of empire; fugitivity; carceral geographies of precarity, immobility, and racial empire; spatial and ecological imaginaries; transnational archipelagic thinking; and colonial knowledges and representations of natural history, monstrous otherness, animals, borders, and frontiers. Paralleling her interest in disability liberation and queer critique, her recent work examines afterlives of colonial moral geographies of illness, gender, and disobedience. Contact.
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