The eighteenth-century story of Bengal’s urban geography is not one of a single metropolis triumphing over rivals but of Calcutta and Murshidabad occupying complementary and contested roles within a political economy shaped above all by state authority and commercial strategy. Far from an inevitable, market-driven “take-off,” Calcutta’s rise was conditioned by the decline of Mughal authority, deliberate colonial interventions, and the structural strengths that earlier favoured Murshidabad. Reading the two towns together clarifies why Calcutta’s expansion remained uneven and politically tethered rather than a self-sustaining metropolitan flowering.
Murshidabad’s institutional depth and Calcutta’s deficit
Murshidabad had long functioned as Bengal’s established centre of courtly administration, landed patronage, and urban cosmopolitanism; its state apparatus and social infrastructure gave it an organic claim to metropolitan status. By contrast, Calcutta entered the eighteenth century as a marginal grouping of villages on the Hooghly without the Mughal civic heritage that legitimised and sustained cities such as Murshidabad or Dhaka. This structural absence—no entrenched state offices, no sustained municipal tradition—meant Calcutta lacked the administrative and social scaffolding that ordinarily produces durable urban growth.
Political displacement and the “forced” elevation of Calcutta
The mid-century rupture changed the balance. As Mughal power waned, the Company’s military and political manoeuvres—particularly after the crises of the 1750s—accelerated Calcutta’s elevation as a regional seat of British authority. But this was a coerced promotion: Calcutta was asked to substitute for Murshidabad before it had the territorial or institutional prerequisites to do so. The destruction or neutralisation of rival European nodes (for example Chandernagore) and the Company’s accumulation of fiscal privileges concentrated trade on the Hooghly, but also made Calcutta’s prosperity dependent on colonial strategic choices rather than on diversified local economic dynamics.
Complementarity, not replacement: the regional matrix of towns
Rather than a linear replacement, the relationship between the two towns was one of complementary rivalry. Murshidabad retained symbolic and administrative significance even as Calcutta grew in commercial and military importance; the Nawabi court and the Company’s governors each sought to manage—and limit—the other’s ambitions. Political actors shuttled between centres, and the regional system adjusted by shifting prominence among Dhaka, Murshidabad, and Calcutta in response to episodic political realignments. The result was a fluid urban field in which no single town enjoyed undisturbed, long-term institutional autonomy.
Territorial limits, labour shortages, and municipal fragility
Crucially, Calcutta’s material capacity to urbanise was constrained. The East India Company did not possess uncontested territory around the settlement until the grant of the 24-Parganas (ceded as zamindari) opened possibilities for expansion—yet even after 1757 territorial growth remained modest, and town boundaries were not clearly drawn until the 1790s. At the same time, chronic labour shortages, periodic food crises, and legislative restrictions on private construction (noted in contemporary accounts) limited household formation, building activity, and the development of a broad artisan base. These scarcities meant that physical and demographic consolidation lagged behind administrative ambition.
Economic morphology: bazar networks, speculative landholding, and skewed investment
Where Calcutta did exhibit energetic activity, it was in market-orientated forms: the growth of bazaar networks, profuse land-purchases by indigenous capitalists, and concentrated investment in wharves, godowns, and warehousing responded to export and fiscal incentives rather than to the diversified urban functions that sustain mature cities. Surplus capital tended to be locked into land and market tenures rather than spent on municipal infrastructure; government priorities (fortifications, customs, Company offices) channelled resources into enclaves that protected trade and administration, producing a spatially fragmented urbanism.
Limits of politically driven urbanization — long-term path dependencies
Reading Calcutta and Murshidabad together makes evident the principal limit of the mid-eighteenth-century transformation: a political imposition can concentrate commerce and create administrative monuments, but it cannot instantly generate the institutional ecology—labour supply networks, municipal finance, integrated services—needed for balanced metropolitan growth. Consequently, Calcutta’s eighteenth-century expansion displayed conspicuous centres of imperial power adjacent to informally organised quarters and a shallow municipal base—a pattern that produced enduring inequalities in landholding, sanitation, and civic provision.
Why the comparison matters for interpretation
To treat Calcutta simply as the inevitable heir to Bengal’s urban life is to miss the political and structural contingencies that shaped its emergence. The juxtaposition of Murshidabad and Calcutta reveals an era in which urban fortunes were frequently reallocated by political authority, producing towns that were simultaneously dynamic and fragile. For scholars and for an encyclopedic account of Calcutta, this comparative lens underscores that the city’s eighteenth-century “rise” was not wholly organic but remained bounded—by territorial politics, labour and food constraints, and by investment patterns oriented to imperial extraction. Those limits explain much of the city’s early morphology and the social fractures embedded in its urban fabric.
Source
Sen, R. (1989, January). A Note on the Urbanization of Calcutta in the 18th Century. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 50, 564-570.
Arup K. Chatterjee 