The Tentacles of Progress

This penetrating examination of a paradox of colonial rule shows how the massive transfers of technology--including equipment techniques and experts--from the European imperial powers to their colonies in Asia and Africa resulted not in industrialization but in underdevelopment. Examining the most important technologies--shipping and railways telegraphs and wireless urban water supply and sewage disposal economic botany and plantation agriculture irrigation and mining and metallurgy--Headrick provides a new perspective on colonial economic history and reopens the debate on the roots of Asian and African underdevelopment.