Situated at the intersection between the history of technology, economic history, and diplomatic history, this paper examines China’s three major waves of technology transfer during the Cold War period: from the Soviet in the 1950s, from Western European countries, the United States, and Japan in the early 1960s and 1970s, and from an even larger group of Western and Eastern countries in the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on heretofore unavailable ground-level factory archives and government documents, this paper looks at how Maoist China alternated between the Eastern and Western Blocs to import advanced industrial technology. In particular, it explores how technology transfer, as a result of geopolitical changes, affected industrial production on the ground level and how factory workers responded to technology from different foreign countries. Theoretically, this paper tends to see technology transfer as political and institutional processes in the local society. Foreign technology was received not only as technology itself; also, it came along with a series of political campaigns and institutional changes by the communist state intended to reinforce their control over factories and workers. For the vast number of local industrial factories, technology transfer turned out to be more about political campaigns and institutional changes than about technological change. Using the case of Cold War China, this paper highlights the role of technology as a contested force that interacted with geopolitics and Maoism to transform the institutions and practice of China’s industrial economy and society in the second half of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth-century communications revolution witnessed Islamic rulers eagerly adopt new technologies en masse. A curious outlier to this was the Afghan ruler Amir Sher Ali (r. 1863-78). Rather than adopt the communications revolution in toto, he adopted the postal system, printing press, and photography, but left out the telegraph. Existing scholarship offers little in the way of explaining this. Historians of nineteenth-century Afghanistan have yet to approach questions of technology due to their consensus that Afghanistan was an isolated backwater. Additionally, historians of the telegraph have only focused on countries that possessed the technology, explaining away those that did not as having lacked access or interest.

My research, however, demonstrates that the absence of telegraphy from Afghanistan was not a question of access or desire. In fact, Amir Sher Ali had offers from both British and Russian officials to have a telegraph network built free of charge. Additionally, the Amir exhibited strong interest in the abilities of the telegraph. This paper argues then that the Amir's decision to not adopt telegraphy stemmed from its interconnectedness with the spread of British and Russian imperialism. Incorporation into a European telegraphic network was seen as an omen of imminent colonial rule. Furthermore, telegraphy would eliminate the communicative delay tactics the Amir employed in order to contain the ever-increasing European demands made to undermine his sovereignty. Thus, this paper allows us to examine the political strings attached to technology and better understand why some technologies floundered in certain contexts more than others.

The existing literature coming from Science and Technology Studies (STS) on colonial India so far has paid insufficient attention to the agriculture sciences. Moreover, the existing studies on colonial India look as scientists not as practitioners of science, but rather as intellectuals and actors engaged in the task of building a modern nation. This article attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by analyzing the native agricultural scientists as science practitioners, as well as their evolving ideas of modern agriculture. It also tries to understand whether the “native scientists” and the colonial British scientists had varying ideas of modern agriculture.

With a handful of exceptions, the historiography from STS perspective of colonial India has primarily relied on English language colonial archival sources. This analysis makes use of both vernacular (Bengali would be used as one of the vernacular archival sources in this research) and English archival sources. This brings on board a broader and divergent perspective in understanding agricultural sciences from the point of view of both the colonizers and the colonized.

Preliminary analysis found that though the “native” Indian agricultural scientists were working under the British government in India, their ideas of modern agriculture for Indian soil varied from those of their British counterparts on many occasions. This is evident when we look at their engagement with various stakeholders both inside their workspace and outside such as their peers, within their laboratories, counterparts, colleagues, cultivators, and literati.

When collagen, abundantly available in all the connective tissues of animals, humans included, emerged as an important research problem right after the discovery of the double helix, G.N Ramchandran (GNR), a young Indian scientist at the University of  Madras, took up this topic as his main research problem. Working from the peripheral location of the Madras University in the newly-independent India during the 1950s,  Ramchandran really had very little of hopes making an actual discovery, for already numerous elite research groups, such as Caltech or the University of Cambridge, had flung themselves in the game. And yet, in the end, Ramchandran finally cracked the structure of collagen, thus producing what has sometimes been called the Madras triple helix model.

Trained in his early career by CV Raman, and thereafter at the University of Cambridge under Lawrence Bragg, GNR returned to India during 1950s to pursue new lines of research. The small Indian scientific community, whose roots had been established during the colonial times, needed fresh discoveries and achievements so as to establish themselves in the scientific game. The discovery of the triple helix structure of collagen by GNR allowed him to bring a new lease of life to this small scientific community as well as to establish a trading zone with the Western scientific community. In exploring the fine structure of the trading zone that GNR built via his collagen model we see how newcomers in science can often function as important sources for new ideas and new insights.