John Bosco Lourdusamy
Biographic Data
| ID | 5812132 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Bosco Lourdusamy |
| GIVEN NAMES | John Bosco |
| FAMILY NAME | Lourdusamy |
| SIGNATURE | LOURDUSAMY J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indian Institute of Technology Madras |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6767-9650 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Focus
This essay revisits Kranzberg's laws in light of developments across the history and sociology of technology over the past few decades. It interrogates the laws' anthropocentric assumptions against recent scholarship that has expanded technological agency beyond the human. It also reconsiders "technological systems" by bringing a wide range of animate and inanimate actors into accounts of technological change. This expanded perspective also compl…
Tea and mobility
This article, using the cropscape framework, examines the convergence of several factors that established tea as a plantation crop in India. It highlights in particular the interplay of labour and machinery in the early years of the tea industry, which involved mobility and flows of multiple kinds, and on various fronts. There have been pioneering works on labour and the different ways in which it was assembled by large-scale displacement of peop…
Moving Crops and the Scales of History
Times
Times uses the concreteness of cropscapes and the elasticity of their histories to question and experiment with time scales, periodizations, and temporalities. Plants have their own rhythms, which humans modify when they grow them as crops. Crops in turn set many of the human rhythms of farming life. States, industries, and businesses all seek to discipline agricultural time yet must also accommodate the natural and social temporalities of the cr…
Fluid Ecologies, Sovereignty, and Colonialism
This article analyses the disputes over riverine islands between two princely states in colonial southern India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These disputes arose because of changes in the islands' landmass caused by water movements. Such tidal temporalities challenged cartographic rigidities and the established notions of sovereignty of states. What were assumed to be sovereign, undisputed and infallible were unsettled by such hydrologic…
Tea War
Reviewed by: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew B. Liu John B. Lourdusamy (bio) Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India By Andrew B. Liu. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 360. This is an ambitious and fairly successful attempt to use the case of Chinese and Indian tea production and trade to tell yet another, different, story of capitalism. It joins the emerging literature—for instance, Sven Becke…
Everyday Technology
Colonialism and the Development of Electricity
Drawing from the social constructivist approach to the study of science, technology and society, this article tries to examine the role of legal, economic, political and environmental factors in determining the course of the development of electricity in the Madras Presidency under British colonial rule. Apart from these factors, the impact of historical events such as the two World Wars on the trajectories of electrification is also analysed. Th…
No prominent works on this page.
Colonialism and the Development of Electricity
Drawing from the social constructivist approach to the study of science, technology and society, this article tries to examine the role of legal, economic, political and environmental factors in determining the course of the development of electricity in the Madras Presidency under British colonial rule. Apart from these factors, the impact of historical events such as the two World Wars on the trajectories of electrification is also analysed. Th…
Everyday Technology
Tea War
Reviewed by: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew B. Liu John B. Lourdusamy (bio) Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India By Andrew B. Liu. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 360. This is an ambitious and fairly successful attempt to use the case of Chinese and Indian tea production and trade to tell yet another, different, story of capitalism. It joins the emerging literature—for instance, Sven Becke…
Moving Crops and the Scales of History
Times
Times uses the concreteness of cropscapes and the elasticity of their histories to question and experiment with time scales, periodizations, and temporalities. Plants have their own rhythms, which humans modify when they grow them as crops. Crops in turn set many of the human rhythms of farming life. States, industries, and businesses all seek to discipline agricultural time yet must also accommodate the natural and social temporalities of the cr…
Fluid Ecologies, Sovereignty, and Colonialism
This article analyses the disputes over riverine islands between two princely states in colonial southern India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These disputes arose because of changes in the islands' landmass caused by water movements. Such tidal temporalities challenged cartographic rigidities and the established notions of sovereignty of states. What were assumed to be sovereign, undisputed and infallible were unsettled by such hydrologic…
Focus
This essay revisits Kranzberg's laws in light of developments across the history and sociology of technology over the past few decades. It interrogates the laws' anthropocentric assumptions against recent scholarship that has expanded technological agency beyond the human. It also reconsiders "technological systems" by bringing a wide range of animate and inanimate actors into accounts of technological change. This expanded perspective also compl…
Tea and mobility
This article, using the cropscape framework, examines the convergence of several factors that established tea as a plantation crop in India. It highlights in particular the interplay of labour and machinery in the early years of the tea industry, which involved mobility and flows of multiple kinds, and on various fronts. There have been pioneering works on labour and the different ways in which it was assembled by large-scale displacement of peop…
History (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Political science (4 works) · Colonialism (3 works) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Politics (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Art (2 works) · Epistemology (2 works)