Building the Railways of the Raj 1850-1900

The major goal of this book is to explain how the British got the Indian railways built. Some 25,000 miles of railway were constructed in India from 1850 to 1900. This involved a substantial investment of British capital, the transplantation of Victorian railway technology to the British Indian empire, the presence of a supervisory cadre of British engineers, skilled workmen and overseers, and the mobilization of millions of Indian workers. Building the Railways of the Raj represents the first, wide-scale examination of this subject in modern times. Based on previously little-used primary sources, this pan-Indian study analyses the construction as a grand, sub-continental and inter-continental assembly of many specific work processes. Unity in this complex labour process is found through a focus on management: management in the broad sense of conception, co-ordination of the process at a multiplicity of levels and the exercise of authority over workers whose labour actually built the railways.