Abstract

"Slippery Industry: Water Scarcity and Commercial Activity in British Colonial South African Port Towns, 1860-1900"

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, Washington University in St. Louis (kristinb@wustl.edu)

From the 1860s into the 1900s, three prominent colonial South African port towns—Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban—developed into major coastal commercial centers that enhanced British imperial power in the region. Each supported an ever-growing number of industries and shops located in and around the harbor and downtown areas, among them factories, mills, woolwashers, shipping companies, hotels, markets, and general shops. This paper argues that the port town commercial world in British colonial South Africa depended on municipal water supplies to keep itself going. As such, when water slipped through cracks in infrastructure, it exacerbated existing water scarcity issues and elevated local anxieties, creating a colonial public that became hyper aware of the wasted water in their urban communities. While scholars have shown that water was a deeply contested part of colonial life in southern Africa, few have discussed how that contestation involved discussions about industrial maintenance and imperial commercial health. Where the average household received water in hundreds of gallons, two hundred a day at most, municipalities calculated industrial use in the thousands thanks to the sheer amount of water larger businesses required. A rich variety of archival sources expose the extent to which wasted water and its contribution to water scarcity occupied South Africa’s colonial port cities. The region thus provides a profitable space in which to consider water scarcity, wasted water, and their relationship to local hydro-capitalistic and environmental issues. Even as all three cities continue to try to prevent the waste of water and its impact on key businesses like tourism and factory production, their histories expose how South African ports have struggled with scarce water and its waste since their nineteenth-century municipal establishments.