Michael W. Charney
Before and After the Wheel: Precolonial and Colonial States and Transportation in West Africa and Mainland Southeast Asia
Charney, Michael W.
Authors
Abstract
Although scholarship on Southeast Asia has generally ignored the role of precolonial transportation in religious, political, and even economic life (in contrast to rather more on the colonial period), historical research on precolonial and colonial West Africa has demonstrated the relationship between efficient transportation, viewed in this scholarship as the transition from predominantly head porterage to rail and motored road transport in the colonial period and after, and political centralisation, ushering in the rise of the modern state. While colonial and postcolonial states in mainland Southeast Asia experienced arguably greater political centralisation as a result of motored road transport and the railways whether the gap here was as great as in West Africa is doubtful. Environmental factors, both presenting constraints and political opportunities helped shape early modern mainland states in particular ways that made them peculiarly reliant on the control of access to and movement on river systems. This paper compares the precolonial and colonial transition in state formation in these two areas and the relationship of this formation to changing transportation technologies and geographies of movement, using what are today Ghana (the colonial Gold Coast) and Myanmar (Burma) as case studies.
Citation
Charney, M. W. (2015, August). Before and After the Wheel: Precolonial and Colonial States and Transportation in West Africa and Mainland Southeast Asia. Paper presented at 8th EUROSEAS Conference, Vienna, Austria
Presentation Conference Type | Conference Paper (unpublished) |
---|---|
Conference Name | 8th EUROSEAS Conference |
Start Date | Aug 11, 2015 |
End Date | Aug 14, 2015 |
Deposit Date | Sep 1, 2015 |
Keywords | Africa, Ghana, Burma, Myanmar, Southeast Asia, roads, wheels, transportation, movement, mobility |
Additional Information | Event Type : Conference |
You might also like
Fall of Saigon
(2025)
Journal Article
Confidence Game: Intelligence, Deception and Subterfuge
(2025)
Book Chapter
Military Reform in Siam
(2024)
Book Chapter
Introductory Comments on the Chapter on Premodern Warfare in the Region
(2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Downloadable Citations
About SOAS Research Online
Administrator e-mail: outputs@soas.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search