The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940

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.