Colonial and postcolonial studies have served as particularly fertile ground for examining the foundations of historical scholarship. Perhaps more than other areas of investigation, they have stimulated critical reflection on long‐standing categories of thought and modes of analysis. In the wake of a generation of scholarship, one cannot think about broad categories such as the Enlightenment or the modern, with their various entailments, without querying their relation to colonial and postcolonial histories. A range of issues now sit in a more complex frame: national and transnational politics, knowledge production, and the constitution of cultures and individuals, to list a few. This special issue entitled ‘Place, voice, interdisciplinarity: understanding technology in the colony and postcolony’ engages this body of scholarship from two perspectives. One is to bring technology into the foreground as a site for and through which colonial and postcolonial experiences were constituted. The other is to put into direct conversation different disciplinary approaches – to suggest the constructive analytic exchanges that are possible (even if difficult) and, indeed, necessary, given the shared concern for thinking about the practices and meaning of technology.
My warm thanks to Suzanne Moon for organizing the contributions to the special issue and for providing the intellectual direction. My thanks, too, to the authors for their research and joining into the spirit of this exercise.