ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Twist to Torsion: Rethinking Empire with Coir Ropework in Nineteenth-Century India

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Science, Technology and Politics

English Abstract

Indispensable to building and sailing, rope made movement, lifting, and connection possible, yet its ubiquity and perishability have rendered it largely invisible in history. This presentation draws from a larger project on the material and cultural histories of rope in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British maritime worlds, focusing on British encounters with Indigenous coir production along the Malabar coast of India. After a series of hemp crises, Britain looked to its Indo-Pacific colonies for new fibers and methods. Coir—though only selectively used on British ships—proved effective in the exemplary, shipworm-resistant teak “Bombay Country” ships, as well as in the maintenance and construction practices of Parsi shipwrights at the Bombay Dockyard. Along the western Indian littoral, local craft traditions and imperial demands together unsettled established notions of material strength. Across materials and techniques, the mechanics of twisting—later formalized as torsion—remained vital to rope’s ability to absorb and counter environmental force through stored energy.
A central question animates this research: how does ropework—twisting, looping, knotting, lashing—constitute embodied forms of knowing? And how has rope, essentially pre-torsioned, moved across craft, mathematics, science, and architecture? Practices of ropework reveal how an ordinary, often gendered material generated extraordinary questions about form, force, and flexibility. Ultimately, this work rethinks the geometry of empire through spirals, torsion, and tolerance—from its maritime peripheries inward.

Author

• Adil Mansure, Harvard University