Author: Daniel R. Headrick

Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0195051165

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.