Pathways of Empire : Circulation Public Works and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c 1780-1914)

Contents Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. 1. Introduction. I. Space Circulation Infrastructure conceptualizing the social history of transport in colonial India 2. Space society history. 3. Circulation and infrastructure. II. Circulatory regimes and public works The case of colonial Orissa in the long nineteenth century 4. Patterns of circulation and modes of transport in Ancien Regime Orissa. 5. Who needs a road Circulation society and the East India Company. 6. Early colonialism Public works and the Orissa Famine. 7. Circulation and infrastructure in the times of colonial capitalism. 8. Kings commerce and Corvee in the Tributory states. Conclusion. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. More and improved roads railways and canals are they in the public interest under all circumstances. Phrases like Public works or infrastructure are rarely subjected to historical reflection. Colonial nationalist and postcolonial operators have presented their transport policies as if they were informed by the needs of a general public and not shaped according to preferences of particularistic forces. Pathways of Empire moves beyond the technocratic progressivism of earlier writings on the history of transport. For the first time theories of produced social space are concretized in order to open a new perspective on India's social history of circulation and infrastructure. Moreover the prevalent and narrow focus on railways is overcome. The effects of the steam revolution are thus located in the wider context of existent South Asian regimes of circulation. Part I of this book develops a conceptual framework of social space that is applied in Part II to the specific historical contexts of the British ruled districts and princely states of Orissa in the long nineteenth century. It reconstructs the slow transformation of an ancien regime of circulation that largely survived the colonial annexation of coastal Orissa by half century into a new regime of circulation that was well tuned into the exigencies of colonial capitalism by World War I. Drawing upon extensive and unexplored archival materials Ravi Ahuja discusses a wide range of issues including caravan and river trade rural resistance against roads and canals the effects of the 1866 famine pilgrimage and migration the commercialization of princely states and the modernization of forced labour. 362 pp.…