Compensation was paid to river interests adversely affected, including some waterfront labourers, the State became owner of the Legal Quays until the 1830s, the Corporation built a canal across the Isle of Dogs, and a new London Bridge eventually replaced the Old. All this depended to some degree on State support; in the case of compensation payments, a Treasury loan was repaid by a tax on shipping. River port prosperity was largely unaffected by the introduction of docks, although their warehousing privileges deprived waterfront wharves of potential business. Coastal and low-duty European imports continued, boosted by the introduction of steamship services. Vessels carrying coal, grain, timber and provisions competed with passenger steamers and river traffic for water space, leading to conflict between users and with the Corporation as Harbour Authority.

The Nguyễn lords initially sought to control Mo Jiu and his descendants by means of stationing troops, marriage alliances, and symbolism and ritual. Jiu managed to secure autonomy for his realm by forging ties with horizontal translocal networks. Buddhist monks connected him to other Chinese communities while serving as intermediaries to the Cochinchinese state. The remnants of the Dragon Gate under Chen Shangchuan’s descendants bolstered Jiu’s military capabilities while helping him forge ties with the Qing Guangdong gentry. He further sought to provide a welcoming climate for Chinese merchants, sojourners, and immigrants by manipulating allusions in Chinese history, especially the Tang, in labeling and categorizing the major landscapes and features of The Port. The Austronesian networks helped him forge ties with island Southeast Asian ports, while the Portuguese creoles set up a mint. The brief Qing maritime ban in 1717, which exempted Vietnam, cemented The Port’s role as an emerging transshipment point, natural resource exporter, and financial center able to interact and compete in its own right with more established emporia, such as Guangzhou, Batavia, and Ayutthaya.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

The series to which this book belongs began with the intuition that the pathway of economic change since independence from colonial rule (1947) differed fundamentally between the states of India because their prehistory, geography, political make-up and initial conditions were very different. So large is the difference that each case deserves a book. Contributions to the series will inevitably structure their work to adapt to the specific experience of the states and cannot follow a single template. In that decision, one thing matters: whether to write a chronological narrative or a thematic one.

There is no ideal choice. We decided to follow the thematic format because we wished to concentrate on the main drivers of economic change, like migration, trends in private investment or environmental change, which did not unfold in a coordinated way. We felt a chronological story suggesting that the 1970s saw one kind of change and the 1980s another would miss the point. Still, to keep chronology in the foreground, we discuss the changing character of the state's economy in the introduction and the conclusion (Chapters 1 and 9).

We wish to acknowledge the anonymous readers of the book proposal, and the reader of the manuscript, for their comments and suggestions that significantly improved the quality of this text. We thank Upasana Guha, who provided valuable research assistance, for her careful and diligent work. The help rendered by Rachel Mathew, Dulhaqe S. and Benna Fathima is also gratefully acknowledged.

A note on placenames: Many placenames have changed since 1956. In every chapter, in the first usage we write both old and new names and use the changed name in the rest of the chapter. Chapter 2 on history uses the old names in subsequent usages.

After a few years of competition following the end of monopolies and exacerbated by the new St. Katharine’s Dock Company, rivalry was muted by rate agreements and the amalgamation of the East and West India Companies. However, except in the Baltic trade south bank docks, regional cargo specialisation to a large extent came to an end. All north bank companies had a core of permanent employees, but most were casually employed. Company records reveal how managers organised, motivated and disciplined their labouring workforce and also how those men with particular skills resisted such control. Relations with the Customs could also be difficult. In 1848, both the London and St. Katharine’s companies were raided, accused of defrauding the revenue by passing off sugar as waste. After a very public row, significant reputational damage to the companies and the intervention of a parliamentary committee, a compromise was reached.

The transition from sail to steam shipping shaped the later-nineteenth-century Port of London. When limited to river trade and traffic, steamers had little effect on facilities. Once improvements in technology extended the economic viability of steamers on ever more distant passages, larger and deeper docks were needed. This led to existing facility improvements and downstream docks. The new steam port, served by major shipping lines, depended on barge transhipment of cargoes to waterfront wharves, which flourished as a result. Trade volumes responded to metropolitan population growth, but the national share remained stable or fell. Wool and grain replaced sugar as leading trades. Re-export business declined. The capital’s relationship with the port changed. In the 1860s, its perceived importance led to the rejection of an eastern Thames embankment. In the 1880s, Tower Bridge went ahead.

Kerala Is Different … Not the Way You Think

The book began with a one-liner – ‘Kerala is different’. The series to which this book belongs emerged from the intuition that every state in India ‘is different’. Kerala was not more different than Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or West Bengal. Geography and resource endowments, social conditions such as patterns of inequality, politics and markets were significantly dissimilar between the larger Indian states, and sometimes between regions within these states. Scholars doing development or history have not explored the differences enough.

And yet that shallow slogan has had an unparalleled impact on development discourse in the late twentieth century. Why has this one state drawn so much attention in the development scholarship? Because of a misreading of its economic history, the book argues.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the state's economic trajectory can be summed up, if crudely, with a chart with three lines, one measuring economic growth and the other two education and life expectancy. The state's position relative to India fell with the social indices but dramatically improved with economic growth. A preoccupation with social development lacks a strong justification, at least for economic historians of the state. The more challenging task for us was explaining the economic growth divergence with reference to prehistory and the state's geography.

The misreading emerged in the 1980s through an overstatement of human development performance. Many scholars inferred that the state's political ideology was more enlightened and developmental than that of other Indian provinces and that the state government's heart was in the right place. Whether due to the communist movement or Travancore and Cochin's princely heritage, the governments prioritised poor people's access to primary education and healthcare. Others further claimed that the state showed the world that economic growth was not needed for development.

This reading is not wrong. But, historically speaking, it is a naive reading. It is naive for three reasons. First, suppose Kerala was ahead of India in the 1950s and 1960s. In that case, a story of enlightened government does not make much sense because governments were relatively small then, and many factors besides the government were at work behind the initial advances in education and health.

Edward A. Tenenbaum’s Jewish parents from Galicia/Austria had been highly educated, his mother with a PhD in botany, his father in medicine, which qualified him to serve in the Austrian Army as medical company commander during all of WW I. They emigrated to New York City in 1920. Three sons were born there, Edward in 1921 as the oldest. After his graduation from Stuyvesant High School at the age of fifteen, he attended Ecolint at Geneva, perfected his French and wrote a prize-winning essay in English there. For his four years at Yale, I treat his study achievements and his extra-curricular activities, especially in Yale’s Political Union. At Yale he was best of his class of 1942. His B.A. thesis on the Nazi economic system was published by Yale UP in 1942. I cover his services for OSS and the US Army Air Forces in the USA and Europe as well as his friendship with OSS colleague and fellow economist Charles P. Kindleberger, who had headed the Enemy Objectives Unit in London. Tenenbaum was the first American officer to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp and wrote a famous report on its self-administration by inmates under SS supervision. For this he was awarded a Bronze Star.