Conveners
Challenging Imperial Infrastructures from Below: Sovereign States, Local Entrepreneurs, and Workers
- Jørgen Burchardt (Middelfart Museum)
Description
Ever since Daniel Headrick developed the theory that technological innovation served as a “tool of empire” in Europe’s massive colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century, historians have depicted colonial infrastructure as a guarantor of economic and political exploitation. In the past decade, scholars have challenged this top-down perspective on infrastructure as an omnipotent instrument of colonial rule. A burgeoning research strand has instead shed a spotlight on local and environmental factors, the colonized people’s engagement with these systems, disruptions in sophisticated logistical networks, as well as their interdependence with other infrastructure systems, both vernacular and imperial.
This panel further complicates the history of imperial infrastructure systems and their planned and unplanned uses. Studying the conflicting history of infrastructure construction, adoption, and contestation in the colonial world, the panelists are particularly interested in infrastructures in transition. Drawing on case studies from different world regions, they embed technological innovation – in particular railways and airplanes – in the wider histories of mobility networks of these regions and follow the expansion of infrastructure systems as much as their persistence and repurposing in the transition period from the colonial to post-colonial era. In this way, the papers explore joint efforts by imperial governments or companies to expand these systems as much as attempts by local actors to tap into infrastructure expansion with the aim of establishing local transportation networks to enhance regional interconnectedness. Zooming in, the papers also study the realities of infrastructure operation on the ground, that is disruptions and (environmental and technological) challenges as well as the workplace and day-to-day experience of those colonial subjects employed in maintaining infrastructure systems. Through this focus on the micro-level, the papers are able to reevaluate questions of dominance, power struggles, gender struggles, and the agency of people engaging with infrastructure as residents, workers, or users. With these case studies, the ultimate aim of the panel is to further decenter technology and infrastructure systems as “tools” and instead highlight the conditions and factors which enabled – or forestalled – their expansion and operation.
Around 1930, Persia was an important nodal point in the growing global network of air routes. Because airplanes could only fly for comparatively short distances, they were not meant to immediately connect two distant cities but made many scheduled intermediary stops. In 1928, Persia became such a stopping place for French, Dutch, and British airlines on their way to their colonial outposts in...
During early 20th century European colonialism in Africa, mining companies were set up as key vehicles for the exploitation and extraction of the interior regions. The colonial powers granted large concessions to these enterprises, giving them control over resources and trade in exchange for investment in infrastructure. Within the scope of these operations, railways played a pivotal role in...
Recent scholarship has challenged previous interpretations on Franco-British rivalry and cooperation in the Middle East by way of suggesting notions such as “frenemies”, “competitive collaboration” or inquiring about the shared production of an “imperial cloud”; that is, a sort of material and immaterial reservoir of imperial knowledge that came to be reflected in schemes and practices such as...
