Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2020
Abstract
In 1877, the major towns of the Straits Settlements - Singapore, George Town, Penang Island and Malacca - suffered a drought of exceptional magnitude. The drought’s natural instigator was the El Niño phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climatic phenomenon then not understood by contemporary observers. The 1877 event has been explored in some depth for countries including India, China and Australia. Its impact on Southeast Asia however is less well-known and the story of how the event unfolded in Singapore and Malaysia has not been told. This paper explores how the contemporary British government responded to the drought, arguing that its impact on hydraulic management was at best minimal yet, it did have impact on other areas, such as forest reservation with the hope of preserving future rainfall. It also highlights how, in contrast to studies on urban water plans in other British Asian colonies, the colonial authorities in the Straits Settlements had a far less coherent and meaningful relationship with water in their town planning schemes.
Keywords
Straits Settlements, drought, urban planning, water conservation
Discipline
Environmental Sciences | Urban Studies and Planning
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Water History
Volume
12
First Page
251
Last Page
263
ISSN
1877-7244
Identifier
10.1007/s12685-020-00260-6
Publisher
Springer
Citation
WILLIAMSON, Fiona.(2020). Responding to extremes: Managing urban water scarcity in the late nineteenth-century Straits Settlements. Water History, 12, 251-263.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3247
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-020-00260-6