23–26 Sept 2024
Leipzig, Germany
Europe/Berlin timezone
Welcome to the 2024 T2M Conference – we hope you find the sessions inspiring and the connections invaluable.

Session

Challenging Imperial Infrastructures from Below: Sovereign States, Local Entrepreneurs, and Workers

PS 23
25 Sept 2024, 09:30
Leipzig, Germany

Leipzig, Germany

Strohsackpassage, Nikolaistraße 10 04109 Leipzig, Germany

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.

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