Heptanesian Archives

In the final week of the semester,I have been avidly procrastinating by reading the major works of Ravinder Kumar, the social historian of western India. Apart from the phenomenal account of the rise of British power in nineteenth century Maharashtra in his magisterial Western India in the Nineeeth Century (1968), I have been dipping into his Essays in the Social History of Modern India (1983). His long article, “From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj: Nationalist Politics in the City of Bombay, 1920-32″, written in 1977, is remarkable in anticipating many of the later historiographic debates on the nature of nationalist politics, particularly the work of Shahid Amin on Gandhi as Mahatma. Indeed Kumar’s work combines the empirical depth and richness of Cambridge School social history with the sophistication and theoretical boldness of Subaltern Studies. And his major works were all completed long before either of these schools of historical writing took over the conversation.

In my own lifetime of thirty years, global society has been transformed by the widespread availability of inexpensive computing technology. Indeed, only within the past ten years, a new combination of commoditised hardware, software, and network infrastructure has put this technology within reach of millions of new people. A certain taint of presentism is, therefore, inevitable in any attempt to write the history of “computing” in our time, as we are positioned at a particular point in a dynamic of ongoing social and technical change. As with earlier historians of the “industrial revolution”, we must assess the historicity of the “information” or “digital revolution” both as historical narratives and popular common sense. This presentism presents particular challenges to the historian in his or her craft of framing a coherent narrative of technological development. Here I will consider different approaches to the history of computing which confront both the the familiar challenges of a historian of technology, as well as the unique aspects of computing as an object of historical inquiry.
Read the rest of this entry »