Amal Mathew

Steel Tracks, Extracted Wealth: Railways and the Political Economy of Colonialism in Asia and Africa

This article examines the role of railways in the political economy of colonialism across Asia and Africa, arguing that colonial rail infrastructure was designed primarily as an instrument of resource extraction rather than as a mechanism for integrated regional development. Drawing on economic history scholarship concerned with British India, East Africa, Central Africa, and southern Africa, the article traces four interlocking dimensions of colonial railway systems: their spatial orientation toward coastal ports rather than interior connectivity; the financial arrangements that transferred fiscal risk onto colonised populations while delivering returns to metropolitan investors; the restructuring of agricultural land use toward export monocultures; and the organised movement of coerced and indentured labour along rail corridors. The article further contends that the developmental asymmetries produced by these systems were not incidental byproducts of otherwise neutral infrastructure, but structural outcomes of an imperial economic logic. Evidence drawn from famines in late nineteenth-century India, the labour regimes of southern African mining, and the post-independence persistence of colonial transport geographies in Ghana and elsewhere supports this contention. The article concludes that reading colonial-era railway maps as records of extraction rather than as evidence of modernisation offers a more historically accurate framework for understanding the infrastructural inheritances that continue to shape economic geography across the Global South.