Daniel R. Headrick - The Tentacles of Progress

A great hope arises every few years that the poorer countries of the world can develop their economies with the help of capital and technology from the industrial nations. Then, after awhile, despair sets in, and the fate of the less developed nations once again seems grim. Such recurring bouts of expectation and disillusionment go back well over a century. As early as 1853, at the start of a great wave of European investments in the tropics, Karl Marx predicted:

I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expense the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railways system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindus are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labour, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.

Almost a century later, in the year of Indian independence, the economic historian T. S. Ashton concluded his book The Industrial Revolution, 17601830 with the rueful remark:

There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.

Despite a century of European rule, India had not become industrialized as Marx had expected, nor had any other non-Western country except Japan. Yet they were not untouched by the upheavals of that century. Theirs was no simple delay in some inevitable process of industrialization, but another, less welcome evolution: the transformation of traditional economies into modern underdeveloped ones.

The period with which this book is concernedfrom the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentiethstretches approximately between these two statements. It does not coincide with the usual periodization of history based on political and military events in Europe, which distinguishes sharply between the nineteenth century (i.e., 18151914) and the twentieth (1914 to the present). For Europe, 1914 was a significant turning point, marking the end of a century of peace and the beginning of a new Thirty Years War. For Asia and Africa, however, 1914 was the middle of the colonial era. This era was one of unprecedented change. Though there had been many empires in the past, never before had one civilization overwhelmed all the others and set them on an entirely new course.

The beginning of our era, in the mid-nineteenth century, is approximate. While the scramble for Africa has gained great notoriety, Western pressure on Africa and Asia was already apparent earlier in the century; witness the Opium War (183942), the explorations of Africa, the war of the Indian Rebellion (185758), and the openings of the Suez Canal (1869). What these events have in common is not only the fact of Western intrusion, but the technical innovations which gave Europeans the power to intrude. And at the other end of our era, it was World War II, not World War I, which set off the disintegration of the European colonial empires.

This era, the new imperialism, coincides with the creation of modern underdeveloped economies in Asia and Africa. While these two processes have often been linked, their relationship remains unclear. A consideration of the technologies involved can shed some light on this question.

The history of technology once consisted only of nuts-and-bolts stories of great inventors and famous engineers. Today, technologies are no longer viewed as externalities that arise fortuitously from the minds of geniuses, but as an intrinsic part of the culture and economy of every society. And the task of the social historian of technology is to study the economic and cultural context in which innovations arise and, in turn, their impact upon the societies in which they appear.

Within this contextual tradition, our approach is to reverse the question. Not only does every technology exist in a social context, all events and all social situations occur in a technological context. Given an event or situation, we may ask, What is that technological context, and what part do technological changes play in it? This approach is familiar to those who study the Great Discoveries, the Industrial Revolution, and the winning of the American West. It needs to be applied to the study of the European empires as well.