Year: 2014 Language: english Author: Clive Dewey Genre: History Publisher: Oxford Format: PDF Quality: Scanned pages Pages count: 354 Description: The history of technology and transport in South Asia has followed a set pattern of received wisdom. Western technology, particularly that based on steam—such as steamboats and railways—is automatically considered to be superior. Introduced in the empire, from the start these technologies are presented as instruments of radical institutional change in the fields of economy and culture. As the author of the current book succinctly remarks, ‘[h]istorians of South Asia working on technology and imperialism have generally found what they set out to find’ (p. 6) and, if one may add, reproduce what they already hold to be true. The book under review breaks with the line of assumed change around the idea of new, western steam technology to tell us the story of the grave limitation that this new technology faced on the River Indus. This sets the author in direct opposition to the ‘the tools of empire’ brand of imperial history writing. Aware of the fact that one case-study might not sweep away the mighty historiographical tradition, Dewey successfully manages to show that the story of steamboats on the Indus was of failure rather than success. In the South Asian case, a larger share of the scholarly work on transport technology is focused on the railways. This book is a welcome addition to the existing literature, and also a novel one in focusing on steamships.
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Steamboats on the Indus
Year: 2014
Language: english
Author: Clive Dewey
Genre: History
Publisher: Oxford
Format: PDF
Quality: Scanned pages
Pages count: 354
Description: The history of technology and transport in South Asia has followed a set pattern of received wisdom. Western technology, particularly that based on steam—such as steamboats and railways—is automatically considered to be superior. Introduced in the empire, from the start these technologies are presented as instruments of radical institutional change in the fields of economy and culture. As the author of the current book succinctly remarks, ‘[h]istorians of South Asia working on technology and imperialism have generally found what they set out to find’ (p. 6) and, if one may add, reproduce what they already hold to be true. The book under review breaks with the line of assumed change around the idea of new, western steam technology to tell us the story of the grave limitation that this new technology faced on the River Indus.
This sets the author in direct opposition to the ‘the tools of empire’ brand of imperial history writing. Aware of the fact that one case-study might not sweep away the mighty historiographical tradition, Dewey successfully manages to show that the story of steamboats on the Indus was of failure rather than success. In the South Asian case, a larger share of the scholarly work on transport technology is focused on the railways. This book is a welcome addition to the existing literature, and also a novel one in focusing on steamships.
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