Bicycles, Ports and Sewing Machines: Western Infrastructure and Everyday Technology Meet in Asia

About This Novel

As a powerful force that changes nature and human society, infrastructure has become an important theme in the field of historical research. This book explores the important role of infrastructure in Asia's modernization process in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In modern times, both Western colonial empires and traditional Asian empires have been modernizing their societies and strengthening their governance through various infrastructures. This book takes the Ottoman Empire, British India, British Ceylon, the Dutch East Indies, the Mekong Delta, and the Philippines as cases, and uses the drinking water projects, port construction, and the promotion of bicycles, sewing machines, engines, and kitchens in these areas as clues to analyze the modernization process of Asian countries in vivid details, showing the social changes brought about by Western infrastructure and the huge changes in ordinary people's daily lives. In this book, the author extends the concept of infrastructure to the field of daily life technology, placing large-scale infrastructure construction and people's daily life equipment in the same field of view, showing the profound changes that infrastructure and modernization have brought to ordinary people's lives. At the same time, he also clarifies that infrastructure is not changing Asia in one direction, but has also been reinterpreted, transformed and utilized locally by Asia, thus demonstrating the complexity and initiative of Asia's modernization process.

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