The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940This penetrating examination of a paradox of colonial rule shows how the massive transfers of technology--including equipment, techniques, and experts--from the European imperial powers to their colonies in Asia and Africa resulted not in industrialization but in underdevelopment. Examining the most important technologies--shipping and railways, telegraphs and wireless, urban water supply and sewage disposal, economic botany and plantation agriculture, irrigation, and mining and metallurgy--Headrick provides a new perspective on colonial economic history and reopens the debate on the roots of Asian and African underdevelopment. |
Contents
| 3 | |
2 Ships and Shipping | 18 |
3 The Railways of India | 49 |
4 The Imperial Telecommunications Networks | 97 |
5 Cities Sanitation and Segregation | 145 |
6 Hydraulic Imperialism in India and Egypt | 171 |
7 Economic Botany and Tropical Plantations | 209 |
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Africa agriculture Bengal Bombay botanical gardens Britain British Empire British India built Buitenzorg cable câbles Calcutta Canal cane capital Chinese cinchona cities coal colonial coloniales communications Company Congo copper cost cotton countries crops cultural Dakar Delhi demand Development Dutch East India Egypt engineers enterprise Europe European export foreign française France freight French hectares Hong Kong Ibid Imperial imported India Office India Office Records Indian government Indian Industrial Indian railways Indies Indochina Indus Institute investments iron and steel irrigation Java Katanga kilometers labor land later lines locomotives London Madras Malaya manufacturers ment meters mill million mining modern Muséum native nineteenth century Paris percent plantations planters plants political production projects Punjab quinine rail railroad Richard Baird Smith River rubber ships stations steam steamers Suez Suez Canal sugar supply Tata technical education telegraph tion tons trade transfer tropical West Western technology wireless
Popular passages
Page 3 - You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.
Page 4 - There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep at night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution
Page 3 - But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways.