CfP: Railway Imperialism Reconsidered
Railway Imperialism Reconsidered: Colonialism, Infrastructure, and Power
Open Panel Proposal for SHOT 2019
24–27 October 2019, Milan (Italy)
Organizers:
Julio Decker, University of Bristol, julio.decker@bristol.
Norman Aselmeyer, European University Institute, norman.aselmeyer@
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 subaltern 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.