Mumbai

est. 1661 — the long account

Mumbai was seven islands. Fished by Koli communities and held by a succession of powers from the Gujarat Sultanate to the Portuguese, the islands passed to the English crown in 1661 as Catherine of Braganza's dowry and were leased to the East India Company for ten pounds a year. The Company, needing a west-coast base, fortified Bombay town and invited in the traders who made it: Parsi shipbuilders, Gujarati and Marwari merchants, Baghdadi Jewish firms.

The land itself is manufactured. Causeways and reclamations beginning with the Hornby Vellard of 1784 stitched the islands into one peninsula through the nineteenth century, just in time for the American Civil War to cut off cotton to Lancashire and make Bombay briefly the richest boomtown in Asia. The cotton kings' money paid for the Gothic quarter — Victoria Terminus, the High Court, the university — raised over the two decades that followed. When the mills turned against their workers and the city industrialized, its chawls and mill districts incubated the labor movement, and its newspapers much of Indian nationalism.

In the 1930s Indian owners built Marine Drive's Art Deco sweep on reclaimed sea-front, a modern skyline of their own; the same decades gave the city its film industry, which outlasted the mills that closed in the 1980s. Renamed Mumbai in 1995, it remains what reclamation made it: a city that was assembled deliberately, deal by deal, and never stopped assembling.

Mumbai · Arabian Sea