PublicPast · Journal of Public History
Articles from this region.
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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.
The dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa represents one of the most consequential episodes in the natural history of our species. This article synthesizes current paleoanthropological, archaeological, and genomic evidence to construct a comprehensive account of human migration from its African origins to the eventual peopling of every habitable continent. Drawing on fossil records, ancient DNA studies, and the material culture of prehistoric populations, the following sections examine the environmental pressures, biological adaptations, technological innovations, and hominin interactions that shaped the trajectory of Homo sapiens as a global species. Ongoing scholarly debates regarding migration timelines, routes, and interspecies contact are critically assessed, and directions for future research are proposed.
