Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity : A Global History of Scandinavia and India at the Industrial Turn, an Introduction

Like a Pandora’s box, a recently found wooden-chest in the attic of an iron estate in south Sweden has opened a window to life and work at the levels of manual labourers and subcontractors. They worked on the large railway construction projects in nineteenth-century India. The documents hidden in the chest have also given rise to a revision of Scandinavian history and, especially, of the poverty-stricken region in which the estate lies as it ties Sweden into the colonial history of the British Empire. The chapter provides an overview and a context both to the key-places of these large transformations and to the historical trajectories of political and economic transformation in Denmark, Berar in western India, and south Sweden that also the Stephens’ family members experienced. It explains a global history that connects southern Scandinavia and western India via colonial processes of conquest, extraction and production, infrastructure projects, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship and, not least, the profound landscape change that followed. As an introduction to this volume, it shows how capital flows, mobility and migration characterised change. Joseph Stephens, the lead character of the volume due to the archive he produced, played a small but important part in these changes and his life was transformed by them. Via his and his family members’ lives, the chapters enter into histories of metropolitan and rural western India and Scandinavia at the time of intensive imperial infrastructure expansion and in the midst of the economic turn in south Sweden