Windmills have been turning for millennia, but they have only been producing electricity for 125 years. Scotsman James Blyth is regarded as the inventor of the technology, He could not celebrate his success, as electric power was seen as the work of the devil.

Burdwan district, with its advantageous position in transportation network and good resource endowments, spontaneously responded to the commercialisation of agriculture. Rice received considerable commercial importance in the second half of the nineteenth century. It found access to new markets within and outside Bengal and consequently rice trade flourished. Rice trade was carried on regularly in an organised way in Burdwan and expanded considerably from the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The collapse of the Maya civilization is often attributed to drought, but is the explanation really as simple as that? On the basis
of evidence from their respective fields, an archaeologist and a palaeoclimatologist call for a more nuanced assessment.

This article examines the making of a modern colonial city through the rhetoric of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ in relation to water. The reference is to the history of water in the city of Delhi and what may be called ‘the first science of environment’ in a colonial urban context, with a focus not so much on the ‘extent’ of water supply and drainage, and its (in)adequacy in the colonial city, as on concerns around the ‘(im)purity’ of water, narratives of pollution, technologies of purity and the transformations they effected in a colonial context.