Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of “cropscapes”: the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public understanding of mobility and history.

Drawing from the social constructivist approach to the study of science, technology and society, this article tries to examine the role of legal, economic, political and environmental factors in determining the course of the development of electricity in the Madras Presidency under British colonial rule. Apart from these factors, the impact of historical events such as the two World Wars on the trajectories of electrification is also analysed. The combination of circumstances that influenced the development of electricity in a colonised territory was quite peculiar in many ways and significantly shaped its ultimate character.

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