Vulnerability and resilience of coastal infrastructure in western India (ca. 1500-1850 CE)

Societies in coastal regions are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increasingly destructive extreme weather. These threats lie outside recent experience and resemble environmental challenges that maritime empires (~1500-1850 CE) dealt with in unfamiliar tropical climates in the Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on exploring past hydroclimatic variability from proxy records and its links to vulnerability and resilience of the built environment in the coastal enclave of Goa in western India from an archaeo-historical perspective. The Portuguese capture of Goa in 1510 and the subsequent expansion of its main city into the capital of the Portuguese eastern empire, combined with its eventual decline and abandonment, represents an ideal case to demonstrate the success and failings of environmental management over 350 years.

We assess how colonial administrations managed their impact on local climates based on the interventions they made into local infrastructure, and what measures they took to ameliorate or adapt to changes in ecosystem services. Assessing vulnerability and resilience is based on the management strategies the archaeo-historic record reveals. Does the evidence point to vulnerability because of mismanagement, as observed for example in the eventual evacuation of the Portuguese capital city of Old Goa for the more salubrious Panjim (modern Panaji) in the nineteenth century? Or, do some interventions lead to more resilient outcomes? Focusing on 350 years of climate and its effects on the built environment in Goa, we explore existing records to produce new insights into past management of climate-related impacts on infrastructure and related ecosystem services. 

Portuguese management of the local environment deployed multiple strategies to mitigate adverse climate conditions. These strategies included adapting the existing Konkan coastal peoples’ structures for littoral environmental management — most notably the khazan system (an intricate network of dikes, sluice gates, and canals that facilitated multiple productive purposes, including aquaculture, agriculture, salt-making, and coastal resilience) — as well as expanding systems already known to the Portuguese including well and cistern construction. Additionally, we argue the Portuguese may have unwittingly benefited from longer term climatic variations that allowed them to build and consolidate their hold on Goa before a confluence of environmental and political events resulted in abandonment of their capital city.