CfP: Open Panel "Railway Imperialism Reconsidered", Society for the History of Technology Annual Conference 2019, Milan, Italy
Since
the 1950s, historians have regarded the intersection of imperial rule
and colonial infrastructure as the straightforward story of means that
achieved goals. Studies in the wake of John Gallagher and Ronald
Robinson’s work as well as the more technology-centered publications by
Daniel Headrick have argued that railroads, alongside telegraph lines
and steamships, were designed as instruments of imperial power. To this
day, the majority of works on colonial railways tends to purport the
linear narrative of “tools of empire” applied in the global periphery to
ensure rule over territory and its economic integration, making the
history of colonial railways a “very boring” field (Clapperton Mavhunga)
that has been left to railroad enthusiasts and lacks in-depth debates.
Colonial railways, however, were more than just the materialization of
great powers’s strategic interests. New approaches in the fields of
cultural, imperial, and global history as well as the history of
technology provide ample inspiration for rethinking their history.
Recent works have shifted the focus from a functionalist approach of
infrastructure to rather complex processes of negotiation, cooperation,
and resistance that occurred in the context of both large-scale projects
and everyday interactions. Canals, for example, introduced new forms of
mobility (Valeska Huber) and were sites of a racialized and gendered
order of labor (Julie Greene). Other scholars have analyzed how the
spread of technology and the integration into global commodity chains
led to environmental degradation (Corey Ross; Pallavi Das).
Transportation technologies altered social structures, and colonizers
and colonized negotiated the meanings and values attached to them
(Ritika Prasad; Jennifer Hart; Lyn Schumaker). Technologies as diverse
as bicycles, sewing machines, or cars, as David Arnold, Kenda Mutongi,
David Edgerton and others have pointed out, were also sites of
collaboration, maintenance, and tinkering, resulting in long-lasting
hybrid and mutating formations.
For colonial
railroads, however, such new approaches to the history of technology
have hardly been explored. This panel addresses this gap by reassessing
the complex relationship between power, railroads, and colonialism.
Railroads reinforced new power relations, but they were also co-produced
by the social, economic, and cultural structures they encountered.
Colonial railways enacted rule over new territories, but the forces they
tried to control also relayed back to the metropolitan centers where
this new infrastructure had been planned, devised, and produced. Lastly,
railroads did not erase agency, but provided local populations with new
opportunities and changed strategies of response. Colonial railroads
allow us to explore histories beyond the classic narrative of railway
imperialism, and we welcome contributors interested in telling these
stories. Contributions may include theoretical or empirical analyses,
covering all topics, approaches, and geographical regions.
If the theme of the proposed panel is of interest to you, we invite you to submit a one-page abstract (maximum 500 words) and a one-page short CV with current contact information by 20 March 2019 to both organizers.