Abstract
The economist Nathan Rosenburg titled one of his books Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History. The message the title conveys is clear: technology and its consequences are poorly understood aspects of economic life. Most writers concede the importance of technology—major writers as diverse in their ideologies as Schumpeter and Mandel stress the importance of technological innovation and change. Others acknowledge the importance of technology transfer as a significant process. However, as Rosenburg shows us, the means of production, technologies ranging from the most simple hand tool to the most complex machine (or machines linked in a productive process, e.g., within a factory) need to be understood better because of their importance in many dimensions of human life.
It is in this context that we can welcome Smritikumar Sarkar’s exploration of technology and rural change. Unlike the preoccupations that inform much recent writing about India’s colonial history influenced by the cultural turn Sarkar focusses on technological change, its effects on the ways in which men and women worked, and the consequences thereof for socio-economic change in Bengal (pre-1947 Bengal provides the bulk of his ‘Eastern India’) over an extended period, c.1830 to c.1980.
Roughly one-third of the book focuses specifically on the consequences of the introduction and operation of a large-scale technical system, the railways. The rest of the book, in which the railways sometimes appear because of their role in transporting other technologies and/or their products, is devoted to a wide range of specific technologies—machines and/or new materials—many of them of the small-scale variety. They included steam engines (in use well before the railway locomotives) followed by petrol, diesel and electric varieties whose adapted and changing avatars over multiple decades coupled to specific technical innovations changed rice milling, sugar cane processing, the machine milling of oil, and much more. Sometimes a specific innovation, e.g., the more effective cane crusher, the ‘Behea’ portable iron mill invented by Thomson & Mylne at their Bihar estate and diffused to Bengal where it dominated by 1900, the rollers could be driven by animate (bullock) or inanimate (steam, etc.) energy sources.
The Behea mill is but one example from the book of an important new technology that was developed in one Indian locality and then spread to other regions of the subcontinent. A strength of Sarkar’s book is its identification of the many sources and causes of technological innovation: Europeans resident in India as in the case of the Behea mill; various foreign countries for the knitting machines imported for the hosiery companies started by members of the bhadralok stratum from the 1880s onwards; Indian braziers shifting to the more malleable European sheets of brass metal as they recognised its production and profit potential; and Rakhaldas Khan of Salkea’s much cheaper and easier to repair rice huller that by 1910 nearly eliminated imported hullers from the Calcutta market.
Technological change, therefore, had many sources and multiple consequences including winners and losers. The rice mills, for example, displaced many rice huskers although the processes of displacement extended over many decades, exhibited sub-regional variation, and appear to have intensified post 1947. Blacksmiths often benefitted. Cheaper imported iron and steel available in more workable forms and transported widely thanks to the railways enabled the blacksmiths to sell cheap and to proliferate. Scrap iron and pilfered coal from the railways encouraged some blacksmiths to relocate close to railway stations to further their competitive edge but at the cost to their village neighbours of longer trips and more downtime when an agricultural implement required repair.
However, the railway technology that dominates Sarkar’s book—as in a sense it dominated India—was imposed on India to facilitate colonial rule and to nourish the Anglo-Indian commercial connection. The railway came to India as an integrated technology comprised of materials, machines, administrative institutions, and ways of working and imported senior personnel. Unlike Sarkar’s other examples the railway was a large-scale technical system that facilitated, linked, enabled or caused much else to happen including, Sarkar argues, the successes and sometimes the failures of the new, small-scale technologies he discusses. The juxtaposition within the book of technologies of such disparate size provides Sarkar with a presentational challenge he does not fully overcome. As a book its whole is less effective than many of its parts and readers will need to mine the chapters for the fascinating insights and nuggets of information on offer.
I think also that insofar as railway technology and the transformative presence Sarkar argues it had in India—‘Steam-driven railways ended the isolation of the village’—we need to be cautious and quite specific in our discussion of the pace and scope of railway generated change. Recent work, e.g., that of Ravi Ahuja and Nitin Sinha and the burgeoning circulation literature, suggests pre-railway India exhibited a good deal of mobility and interaction and that the ‘triumph’ of the railways was an evolutionary process, took a good deal of time, and exhibited local and regional variation. It was, moreover, short-lived because mechanised road transport began to emerge as a serious competitor by the 1930s (Tetzlaff). In fairness to Professor Sarkar, he does present a more nuanced picture in his substantive chapters.
Sarkar uses a wide variety of primary and secondary sources in English and Bengali. He also makes considerable use of folklore to illustrate ‘the deep imprint’ the railways ‘made upon the contemporary mind’. However, there are some surprising omissions from the secondary literature with which he engages or uses. For example, given the topic one would have expected some reference to David Arnold’s The New Cambridge History of India, III, 5: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Similarly, because Sarkar devotes a fair bit of space to railway construction and its consequences, especially construction employment, engagement with Kerr’s work (be it in refutation, modification or confirmation) published in IESHR (vol. 20: 3) and modified in Building the Railways of the Raj plus Sunanda Krishnamurty’s criticisms (IESHR, vol. 24: 1) of Kerr’s initial employment estimates would be constructive. Finally, the book would have benefitted considerably from a map or two.