Dr. Aparajita Mukhopadhyay‘s latest article, Rethinking Technology Transfer in a Colonial Milieu: Railways and Shifting Meanings of Travel in Late Colonial India, was published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
By examining late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Annual Railway Reports, railway passenger statistics, newspaper reports, travelogues, and pamphlets written by Indian railway travelers, Dr. Mukhopadhyay highlights the agency in late colonial India, where local communities were not merely passive recipients of technological advancements but actively influenced the outcomes of this technology transfer. This article critically challenges both the ‘technology as imperialism’ and ‘technology as subversion’ historiographical paradigms, offering new insights into how we should understand and analyze technology transfer.
Full article can be found here.