Technology and Imperialism in the Indian Context: the Case of Steamboats, 1819–1839

Abstract

Technology has always played a decisive role in shaping the course of human history. Until scientific theories gave birth to a new science-based technology during the post-renaissance period, its role was, however, limited to the level of the empirical tools and implements man used to meet his first needs. But once technology began to be recognized as a product of scientific theories, its sphere of influence widened enormously. It was their technological advancement which motivated and helped the Europeans during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to expand overseas, an event that altered the course of history. Unfortunately most of the historical literature on imperialism gives the role of technology secondary importance. A few even disparage it. The available literature on the history of technology is basically a mere compilation of the technical history of given artifacts, uprooted from its social base and bereft of its political implications. Historiography, however, can change. The works on imperialism that ignored technological aspect were written more than two decades ago, a period when, as Geoffrey Blainly observed, ‘historians felt uneasy outside the old triad of political, social and religious history’.¹ Daniel Headrick’s Tools of Empire (Oxford, 1981) is therefore a useful addition, a book which, as the author claims, ‘opens new vistas and provokes fresh thinking on the subject by adding the technological dimension to the list of factors other historians have already explored’.²