| Tóm tắt: | <p>This thesis examines the process of moving between ship and shore at the English East India Company port of Madras (Chennai) between 1750 and 1895. It argues that while the history of technology in the British empire has largely focused on the deployment of Western innovations, the daily administration of empire was instead dependent on indigenous technologies and practitioners. Madras’s dangerous littoral environment meant that trade was facilitated by masula boats and catamarans, built, manned, and owned by skilled local boatmen.</p>
<p>Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, British dependency on masulas and catamarans allowed the boat people to control the littoral technologically. This thesis argues that the boatmen dictated the speed and volume of trade, and British administrators struggled to introduce regulatory solutions to issues of boat and labour shortages and theft. Merchant dissatisfaction with the boat-based system of movement in the mid-nineteenth century led in part to the eventual construction of port infrastructure. The decision to build in the littoral was the result of both local and imperial impetuses, but a prioritization of metropolitan theoretical expertise over local nautical expertise by Parliament and imperial administrators resulted in the adoption of designs that were ill-adapted to local conditions and repeatedly damaged by daily and monsoonal conditions.</p>
<p>Not only does this thesis find that imperial administrators were dependent on indigenous technology for the daily administration of empire, but its littoral approach to Madras also demonstrates that the relative success of different technologies is based on adaptation to the local physical, commercial, and political context. Acknowledging British reliance on local technologies and skilled knowledge holders for essential day-to-day activities leads to a reevaluation of the nature of empire itself. Rather than based solely on dominance and innovative European technologies, empire required adaptability in its administrators and was maintained by local practitioners and locally developed technologies.</p>
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