Almost exactly a hundred years after the Permanent Settlement of 1793 revolutionized property relations in Bengal, a far less studied legislation would subtly extend the rule of property to include the province’s waters. Bengal’s Private Fisheries Protection Act 1889, which is usually regarded as having been motivated by conservationist or economic concerns, was in fact an attempt to resolve intractable legal problems surrounding the status of flowing waters and fish that had confounded judges and colonial officials in India for decades. Could water be owned like land? And could fish swimming in open waters be claimed as property? These questions would give rise to a number of important disputes in colonial India in the late nineteenth century, during a time associated with unprecedented changes in the agrarian economy. Coinciding with other legal manoeuvres that increasingly helped to render water as property in other parts of the world, the Private Fisheries Protection Act and important judgments that preceded it helped to create exceptional private rights over flowing waters in colonial India. Turning to these developments, this article examines the ways in which judges attempted to resolve contradictions generated by water’s very materiality in an economy that rested so heavily on property.

中文翻译：

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1860-1890 年印度殖民地的水、鱼和财产

在 1793 年永久定居点彻底改变了孟加拉的财产关系几乎整整一百年后，一项研究较少的立法将巧妙地将财产规则扩展到包括该省的水域。孟加拉 1889 年的《私人渔业保护法》通常被认为是出于保护主义者或经济考虑，实际上是为了解决围绕流水和鱼类状况的棘手法律问题，这些问题困扰了印度的法官和殖民官员数十年. 水能像土地一样被拥有吗？在开阔水域游泳的鱼能否被视为财产？这些问题将在 19 世纪末期的印度殖民地引发一系列重要争端，当时农业经济发生了前所未有的变化。与在世界其他地区越来越多地将水作为财产的其他法律手段相吻合，《私人渔业保护法》及其之前的重要判决有助于在印度殖民地建立对流动水域的特殊私人权利。转向这些发展，本文研究了法官们试图解决在如此严重依赖财产的经济中由水的物质性所产生的矛盾的方式。