Colonising the sea: land reclamations, imperialism, and the Anthropocene in East Asia

The large-scale reclamation projects that have colonised the sea by pushing the coastline seaward at numerous locations in East and Southeast Asia since the 1950s have their antecedents in more modest efforts at reclamation in colonial-imperial Asia. These include the infilling of estuarine and coastal waters to create ‘bunds’ at treaty ports in China and Japan and the infilling of parts of Victoria Harbour by the British in Hong Kong. The chapter traces the trajectory from these early reclamations to those associated with industrialisation, focusing on Japan and the role of reclamation in creating new land for steel mills, shipyards, and other industrial infrastructure in the build-up to the Pacific War and their role in Japan’s colonisation of Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s. It is argued that the proliferation of coastal reclamation projects through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries speaks to a growing disposition to regard all space as incipiently human habitat and for areas of sea lying immediately offshore to be regarded simply as land-in-waiting, a watery tabula rasa upon which to project terrestrial futures. This disposition finds expression in the inherent chauvinism of the term ‘reclamation’. Moves towards decolonisation include creating artificial beaches and wetlands on the edges of reclamations, providing habitat for some of the biodiversity displaced by the original act of reclamation.