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Subir Bhaumik

Before Calcutta (now Kolkata) became an ‘Imperial city’ it had, according to Captain Alexander Hamilton in 1710, ‘docks for repairing and fitting ships’ bottoms’. Most likely Armenian traders used these docks to trade with ‘China to the East and Persia to the West’ many decades before Job Charnock founded the city, clubbing together the three swampy villages of Kalikata, Sutanuti and Gobindapur. It is from Calcutta that the British, according to Geoffrey Moorhouse in 1971, created ‘an empire at which they looked with incredulous elation’. After Calcutta had emerged as the leading port of Britain’s Indian empire and as its capital, its importance grew several fold when the Suez Canal opened in 1869. The river Hooghly made navigation difficult, as it continues to do today, but the huge returns from trade never failed to entice the freebooter and the brave. A Dutch fleet of seven ships even negotiated the channel without pilots (as ships entering Calcutta rarely did) in 1759 – two years after the battle of Plassey – in a futile bid to stop the English from using Calcutta port ‘as an entrepot’ to create the financial sinews of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.

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Orit Halpern

When describing the word logistics there are few things that at first appear more unintuitive than the term ‘concrete’. Seemingly solid and rock-like, concrete is immobile and heavy. On reconsideration, of course, concrete was and continues to be the very infrastructure for industrialization. Since the 19th century, it has been the material that made possible roads, buildings, factories and many other built environments that are now commonly understood as ‘modern’. In fact, it is the material most often invoked in modernist architectural and design projects. The very auteurs of modernist design and architecture such as Le Corbusier favoured the material. When called upon by Nehru to produce a new capital for the post-colonial Punjab – the city of Chandigarh – Corbusier did not hesitate to build the monumental structures of concrete, even as the material was found to be almost untenable and unmaintainable under the climatic conditions. These now seemingly decaying but still operative monuments continue to serve, however, as both icons and memorials to a previous industrial and national order fantasized in the wake of Independence. It is not only Indians who fell in love with concrete. From the Bauhaus to the Futurists, concrete was the preferred building material that bridged nature with industry to induce new possibilities for ever faster cars, buildings and cities. All these utopias were built on a cement foundation that would creatively destroy the world before it.

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Giorgio Grappi

Logistics outside logistics

Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour studies Chinese-led globalization and the role played in it by logistical operations and related infrastructures such as ports, railways, pipelines or IT networks. The project seeks to understand how global logistics is reshaping global governance and the relations between political command, institutions and economic calculation. The research is being developed around three main sites: Piraeus Port in Greece, the port area of Kolkata (Calcutta) in India and the complex of Chilean logistical infrastructures, including the port of Valparaíso.

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Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Our previous collective research project, Transit Labour (2009-2012), investigated circuits of labour and logistical operations in Shanghai, Kolkata and Sydney. Transit Labour traced the informality of e-waste industries and the political economy of standards in printed circuit board manufacturing in China. An extensive period of field work, site visits and archival research made clear how the rise of ‘New Towns’ supporting the IT sector in Kolkata was made possible by land zoning policies that resulted in the seizure of land from peasants, which we understood as a process of primitive accumulation. In Sydney our research focused on labour in regimes of governance related to shipping container loading and unloading times, transport routes, warehousing and inter-modal terminals. We saw how these primary components of a logistical city present a model of space, time, labour and economy whose dynamics register in ways distinct from the global city of finance capital and the industrial city of factories. Peripheries become primary spaces of coordination and control. Global infrastructural and software standards stitch spaces, labour and operational procedures together across diverse geographical scales and modalities of time.

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