David Arnold continues his inimitable histories from below with a charming little book on what he calls “everyday technologies”—technologies that “despite their foreign provenance and lack of spectacular impact . . . radically transformed key areas of Indian life, from the street and home to the jail and factory” (p. 11). Everyday Technology traces the origin stories and social histories of four particular goods—bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, and rice mills—in India from their introduction in the late 1800s to the transitional postindependence period in the 1960s.

Unlike most large, industrial-scale investment in colonial India, which was facilitated by the colonial government and executed with managing agency capital and local labor, the stories around these four goods are largely of multinational retail competition in India, with the emergence of winners like Singer and Raleigh. Many of these companies entered the Indian market in spite of the views of colonial administrators, who initially viewed Indian consumers as being unable to adapt to such modern conveniences. But as Arnold illustrates, these everyday technologies had become very much a part of the Indian experience by the 1960s, not just in large metropolitan areas but also in suburbs and villages.

The real strength of this book comes not from the narratives around the introduction of these goods into India, but from using them as a lens through which to examine trends in public thought and social organization. One chapter uses literary and periodical sources to document how these technologies served as a means of differentiation, accentuating some of the existing racial and gender roles in India. Another chapter examines the interaction of nationalist thought with its swadeshi (homegrown) ideals and the gradual transition from importing products to using these technologies in domestic manufacturing. Yet another looks at the construction of a healthful image through the advertising of these modern goods—an image that was sometimes at odds with the realities of factory life. And finally, Arnold considers how different arms of the state employed, regulated, and confronted these goods as they became increasingly useful, not just to exercise state power, but also to oppose it. Using these four technologies to build a larger narrative about Indian modernization, Arnold makes a compelling case for greater consideration of “everyday” goods in technological histories.

One reason the book is so compelling is the variety of sources and evidence that it uses. The colonial archive is the natural starting point, where Arnold gets most of his foundational material: statistics, government reports, and accounts by colonial administrators. But from there he moves on to a wealth of secondary literature, periodicals, and biographies. The capstone of this book is its literary and philosophical references. The aforementioned chapters are replete with the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo and the novels of Mulk Raj Anand and Rohinton Mistry. With these references, the author embeds the goods within the larger social context in a way that any historian would envy.

In some ways, this book can be compared to more contemporary sociological works, like The Great Indian Phone Book by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey (2013), which analyzes the various effects of the introduction of mobile phones on family dynamics, political campaigning, employment opportunities, and more in modern India. But by doing such sociological analysis in a historical context, Arnold sets the stage for what could be a new set of “everyday” histories in India, based on the introduction, adoption, perception, and consequences of widely owned technologies. Pedagogically, this book would be a great methodological example of using material anchors for larger philosophical and cultural discussions.

Ultimately, the idea of the “everyday” has been around for decades, particularly in the fields of anthropology and sociology. By importing this concept, Arnold has pushed cultural and technological history into new areas. The bibliographical essay at the end of this book is a fantastic starting point to understanding the intellectual currents behind modernization, not just in India, but all across the developing world. Those who are interested in the marketing and optics of Western technologies in colonial India, especially by multinational corporations, will also find this book particularly useful.