Short Abstract

Infrastructure is concrete and capital, but also housing, labour, and care. This panel brings historians of colonial infrastructure into conversation with scholars of contemporary investment to rethink large scale foreign investment in Africa and consider who is empowered and disempowered by it.

Long Abstract

Infrastructure is never just concrete and capital, funded and owned by states and firms: it is also housing, labour, and care. Africa has long been shaped by large-scale foreign investment in infrastructure, from colonial-era railways and ports to today’s renewed wave of investment by China and other state and private actors. The effects of these investments remain highly contested. This panel examines infrastructure investment across the colonial and contemporary periods, not to use history as a backdrop for explaining the present, but to put historians and scholars of the contemporary in direct conversation with one another. This panel reads infrastructure in two ways: the funding and politics behind it, encompassing money, ownership, and state interests, and the social reproduction it depends on and produces on the ground, including who builds, houses, feeds, and cares for the labour force, and whose work remains unpaid or unseen. We invite contributions responding to ‘Who produces which infrastructure? And who or what does such infrastructure enable and disable?’ or similar questions. Papers might draw on resettlement, worker dormitories, informal economies, or other material grounded in their own cases. Taken together, these different aspects form a prism: the same infrastructure refracts into different realities depending on the vantage point, whether funder, worker, state, or household, and depending on whether we view it from the colonial or the contemporary moment. Overall, we aim to shed light on aspects of large-scale foreign investments in infrastructures that often remain hidden behind grand development objectives and impressive investment volumes.

Propose paper