Speculations on infrastructure: from colonial public works to a post-colonial global asset class on the Indian railways 1840–2017

Abstract

This paper issues a challenge to examine the current emergence of infrastructure as a global asset class against a longer-term colonial history of speculation. Taking the case of the Indian railways, it shows that their current financialization and transformation into a logistical network emerges from colonial techniques of calculations of risky frontiers, state guarantees and debt accounting. Historical forms built from racial and national inequalities have been incorporated into a new era of the financialization of public works led globally by the World Bank. This new moment erases the distinctive political histories of public works, while also capitalizing on these. Overall this leads to two theoretical claims: firstly, that we should only use the term ‘infrastructure’ self-consciously as a mode of critique of such contemporary moves. Secondly, that our theories derived from Marx, Foucault and Callon place too much emphasis on ‘economization’ and that we need to replace this with attention to speculation. Speculation is affective, intellectual and physical labour that aims to direct capital towards various ends. It involves the ethical imagination of social differences and places distinctions of race, nation and gender at the core of calculative regimes. This labour is governed by key nodal contracts between the market and the state and associated accounting and legal regimes or treaties for accumulation.

Keywords:

• infrastructure
• speculation
• debt
• railways
• public good

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on three periods of archival research from 1997–1998, 2008–2009 and 2016–2017 in the India Office Library, National Archives New Delhi and Calcutta National Archives and Indian Government archival and online resources. I would like to especially thank the railway and river workers with whom I have carried out research since 1992 (it is because of their contribution that I write against ‘economization’ here), the GENS collective and my colleagues in the Anthropology Department at LSE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ricardo was also a friend of D. McCulloch. Ricardo was a member of the East India Company’s Court of Proprietors.

2 First Raj Krishna Memorial Lecture 1995: Economic Reforms for the Nineties, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Department of Economics, University of Rajashan, Jaipur. http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/speech/spemsa/msa033.doc

3 Financing Private Infrastructure: Lessons From India, http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/speech/spemsa/msa009.pdf

Additional information

Funding

The research period 1997–1998 was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the period 2008–2009 by an ESRC grant and the period 2016–2017 by a sabbatical from the Anthropology Department at London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes on contributors

Laura Bear

Laura Bear is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 1992 she has carried out archival and ethnographic research in India. She is the author of: The Jadu House: An intimate history of Anglo-India (Doubleday, 2000); Lines of the nation; Indian railway workers, bureaucracy and the intimate historical self (Columbia University Press, 2007) and Navigating austerity: Currents of debt along a South Indian River (Stanford University Press, 2015). She has authored several papers on time and timescapes including a Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute special issue, Doubt, conflict, mediation: An anthropology of modern time (2014).