Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate "big" technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and travelled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood.

About the Author
David Arnold is professor emeritus of Asian and global history in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Among his numerous works are Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India; Gandhi; and The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856.

Reviews
"Everyday Technology organizes an enormous amount of unfamiliar detail on a hitherto largely neglected subject, reinforced with copious statistics and illustrated with some appealing historical and contemporary images." (Nature) "In this fascinating study, Arnold casts his eye over a range of much smaller and humbler machines which, nonetheless, have transformed the 'everyday' lives of the people using them." (Times Literary Supplement)



Book Information
ISBN 9780226269375
Author David Arnold
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 312g
Dimensions(mm) 22mm * 14mm * 1mm