Cycles of Empowerment? The Bicycle and Everyday Technology in Colonial India and Vietnam

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2108664
AutoresDavid Arnold (0000-0002-8781-4095, University of Warwick, autor de correspondencia), Erich Dewald (SOAS University of London, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen53
Número4
Páginas971-996
Fecha de publicación2011-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417511000478
OpenAlexW1995294560
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas28
Referencias citadas29

In recent years, discussion of technology in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial world has moved away from earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and the instrumentality of empire's technological 'tools' of conquest and exploitation. There has been a broad shift from diffusionist preoccupations with a one-way traffic in 'technology transfers' that privileged Euro-American innovation and entrepreneurship, to consideration of the 'social life of things' within the colony. This has corresponded with a move away from understanding technology through European representations of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other, to rethinking technology's role in reconfiguring social hierarchies and cultural practices in colonized or semi-colonized non-Western societies. Without ignoring empire's importance in facilitating change or restricting the socio-economic parameters within which innovative technologies might operate, there has been a growing tendency to identify colonialism as a conduit for technological modernity rather than its primary embodiment. The colony is understood as a locally constituted, rather than merely imperially derivative, site for engagement with techno-modernity and its discontents. Scholars now commonly eschew emphasis on the implanting of 'big technologies' such as railroads, telegraphs, steamships, modern weaponry, major irrigation works, and electrification systems (capital-intensive, often state-managed technologies that figured proudly in the rhetoric of imperial achievement), in favor of the ways in which these were understood, assimilated, and utilized by local agency. There has also been growing interest in small-scale, 'everyday technologies,' from the sewing machine, wristwatch, and radio, to the typewriter, camera, and bicycle. Colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or disinclined to control these, and they passed with relative ease into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspirations of colonized and postcolonial populations

Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Empowerment · Everyday life · Modernity · Political economy · Political science · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies