Deze online lezing maakt deel uit van de reeks ter gelegenheid van Railway 200, via het Transport & Mobility History Seminar van het Institute of Historical Research. De toegang is gratis en is bedoeld voor iedereen die geïnteresseerd is in spoorweggeschiedenis.
While recent ethnographies of the everyday state and the anthropology of bureaucracy have illuminated how frontline workers embody the moral and affective dimensions of governance, the ethnographer’s gaze has often remained the primary lens. Far less attention has been given to how such workers write themselves into history, through memoirs and autobiographical fragments dismissed as nostalgic or unreliable.
This seminar turns to such self-representations, drawing on select memoirs by British station masters alongside oral histories from the National Archive of Railway Oral Histories (NAROH). Together, they open a window onto the mid-twentieth-century railway, a landscape historians have often treated as an in-between time, suspended between the grandeur of the Victorian age and the bureaucratic sobriety of post-war British Rail.
Read attentively, these accounts form not mere reminiscence but a mode of infrastructural self-knowledge: reflections through which workers made sense of the railway’s temporal discipline, its material intimacies, and its ethical demands. Station mastering emerges as an improvisational craft, poised between order and contingency, rule and care, a practice through which the railway itself becomes legible as a lived bureaucracy.
Nirali Joshi is a human geographer with key areas of work and interest in anthropology of the state, political geographies of public provisioning, and the socio-labours of everyday infrastructural worlds. Her current work has a strong empirical focus on the postcolonial railway. From 2024 until 2026 she is a researcher on the RAILIMAGE project, that writes the global qualitative and imaginative history of the long-distance railway journey in the twentieth century.