The movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that arose in the making of property in these amphibious spaces, the article argues that the soaking ecology of Bengal became a site for productive law-making by creating open-ended possibilities for taking land. It demonstrates how the Company used this new land formation to gradually institute a legal architecture regulating alluvion and dereliction and subsequently subjecting these soaking ecologies to an intricate documentary regime with the aim of disciplining the existing landed property relations in Calcutta. Documenting the haphazard extension and enactment of these new legal doctrines in a mobile landscape illuminates a particular history of the colonial regime of property and the Company-State’s early articulations of a particular type of quasi-eminent domain as a manner of taking land. Pushing a new direction in legal geography, the piece shows how the legal arena became a productive site for geographical knowledge production and legal experimentation in the colony.

中文翻译：

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流动的历史：孟加拉殖民地的沼泽，法律和公司状态

休格利河在1804-5年的运动导致冲积物沿着加尔各答的河岸沉积，并随着东印度公司的所有权危机而发展。公司通过制定新的法律类别和管理语言来管理这些新形成的土地，从而使自己成为加尔各答土地和土地财产的公共代理人。文章着眼于在这些两栖空间中制造财产所产生的殖民地水文学的特定法律方面，文章认为，孟加拉的浸泡式生态通过创造无限的征地可能性而成为生产性立法的场所。它说明了公司如何利用这种新的土地形式逐步建立起规管冲积和失职的法律架构，然后使这些浸泡的生态受到复杂的文献制度的管理，目的是规范加尔各答现有的土地产权关系。在流动的环境中记录这些新法律原则的随意扩展和颁布，可以说明殖民地财产制度的特定历史，以及公司-国家早期对特定类型的拟主要领域的表述，以作为征用土地的方式。该作品向法律地理学的新方向发展，展示了法律舞台如何成为殖民地地理知识生产和法律实验的生产基地。