Technology on the Spot: The Trials of the Congreve Rocket in India in the Early Nineteenth Century

This essay attends to actors' geographies, the constructions of space and empire that historical actors developed in negotiations over imperial technologies. Historians have contrasted "localist" and "universalist" accounts of imperial technology transfer. This essay proposes that versions of both localist and universalist accounts served actors in technological negotiations, and demonstrates this by considering the efforts of British inventor Sir William Congreve to sell war rockets to the East India Company in the early decades of the nineteenth century. While Congreve insisted on a universalist account of technology transfer from an imperial center (Britain) to a periphery (India), the company viewed rockets as negotiated, hybrid entities, emergent from and adapted to local conditions and Indian tradition. The essay concludes by noting the value of immobility for both sides in the dispute: the desire to keep the manufacture and testing of new technology under local control, as a precondition for effective imperial circulation.