ABSTRACT
Like a Pandora’s box, a recently found wooden chest in the attic of a southern Sweden iron estate opened a window to life at the levels of manual labourers and subcontractors on the railways in nineteenth-century India. These private and business documents of a subcontractor have also initiated revisions of Scandinavian history and tied the Småland region into the colonial history of the British Empire. The chapter provides an overview to key places of the large transformations that generated the documents. It explains a global history that connects southern Scandinavia and western India via colonial processes of conquest, extraction, and production, infrastructure projects, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship and, not least, the profound landscape change that followed. As an introduction to this volume, it shows how capital flows, mobility, and migration characterized change. Joseph Stephens, the lead character of the volume due to the archive he produced, played a small but important part in these changes, and his life was transformed by them. Through his and his family members’ lives, the chapters enter into histories of metropolitan and rural western India and Scandinavia at the time of intensive imperial infrastructure expansion and in the midst of the economic turn in south Sweden.
