Urna’s Reviews > The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century > Status Update

"The British community of Calcutta, which felt isolated from its homeland-a round trip took a year or more-saw in steam a means of accelerating communications. In 1825 it offered a prize to the first steamer to make the trip in seventy days or less. In response, a group of steam enthusiasts in London built the Enterprize, a large ship with a weak and fuel-hungry engine."

"The Opium War was the first event whose outcome was determined by specially built gunboats. Not by accident did gunboats appear in China at the right moment. They were the end product of a complex process of creation resulting from the confluence, in the mid-1830s, of two historical forces ..."

"The debate on the new imperialism is essentially the result of conflicts in the ordering of causes. To defend the importance of a new factor is therefore to run head-on into ,other interpretations."
Not sure if this can be entirely avoided. For e.g., in the next page when he lays out the three possible scenarios involving the culmination of motives and means, he ends up setting up a loose ordering of causes himself.