Project information
Project manager
Eleonor Marcussen
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University
Financier
The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet)
Timetable
1 April 2021– December 2024
Subject
History (Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities)
More about the project
With the arrival of railway construction in rural areas and towns throughout western India, the environmental situation and local communities’ relations with resources and work changed during the decade of the 1860s. Not only had the railways as an infrastructure increased speed and capacity in trade; the physical presence of the grid had far-reaching effects on how local communities engaged with the environment.
The research examines the consequences of the railway expansion in central India and how changing environmental conditions affected people’s livelihoods in the region through which the railways was built during the 1860s. With a view to current debates on the diffusion of technology, knowledge and the environment, the project aims to contribute to our understanding of how technologies thought of as “Western” developed in the Global South (Edgerton 2010, 2007). Local environs and local communities invariably engaged with the implementation and development of technological innovations through continuous encounters and adaptations with the railway and its construction.
There is an established body of research on infrastructure in the British Empire and in particular in British India, yet few historians take socio-ecological relations into consideration, partly since the sources are scarce, partly since the field of environmental history and Science and Technology Studies is evolving. “Tracks through nature” aims to fill that gap. By exploring relationships between infrastructure, environment and local communities, the project’s long-term goals are to problematize current understandings of infrastructure as “tools” of Empire or agents of cultural and social change. The project will bring out publications on in particular non-elites involvement with and experiences of environmental conditions in the construction of the railways.
Building upon my previous research and current project funded by the Crafoord Foundation, this project studies the implications of infrastructure’s power to re-organize social, political, economic, and ecological life in the colonial period. By focusing on environmental conditions and resources, it addresses how insights into technological systems enable and deepen, sometimes even transform, understandings of past human-natural interactions. During the project period, the research intends to stimulate focus on infrastructure’s socio-environmental consequences in imperial contexts, a significantly understudied theme considering how imperialism, modernity and scientific change intertwined and thrived on local environments in particular during the nineteenth century.
----------
The project is part of:
Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
Cluster for Colonial Connections and Comparisons
