ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a broad historical overview of Bombay’s rise to prominence during the course of the nineteenth century and highlights some of the salient features of the city’s growth. The first section identifies the key turning points in Bombay’s development as a commercial, financial and industrial centre. The second section delineates the social profile of the city in this period, paying particular attention to the interplay of caste, community and class. The following section focuses on the spatial ramifications of Bombay’s rapid development, and underscores patterns of continuity and change in the city’s social geography. The penultimate section draws attention to Bombay’s deepening civic crisis in the wake of rapid industrial urbanization from the 1870s. It shows how even as the city was transformed by industrialization, its civic infrastructure retained its pre-industrial character. The consequences of the city’s worsening civic problems were largely borne by its working classes who experienced high rates of disease and mortality. The final section charts the institutional history of municipal governance to explain why Bombay’s local authorities failed to deal adequately with its mounting civic woes in the late nineteenth century.
