The Peasant’s Calculator

This chapter describes technology, which was central to many ideas about a world marked by occupancy. Technology was a key element that explained how post-colonial countries might simultaneously redistribute their land and build a solid economic future. The chapter explains how some visionaries imagined peasants as potential micro-industrialists, manufacturing buckets and hoes for their neighbors. It looks at Indian ideas about small-scale technology and its role in supporting peasants that eventually inspired UN projects for the distribution of hoes, maps, and bibliographies. The ultimate evolution of that vision might be best symbolized by the Curta, a handheld calculator that would plug the Indian peasant into global networks of information about price, opportunity, and credit and help them to bid on prices.