Leena Lindell

Thesis

Thesis

Between Worlds: Kenneth Cantlie and locomotive engineering in Africa, the Americas and Asia

Supervisor: David Clayton

Research

Research

My research will examine how British railway engineering knowledge was transmitted through transnational social networks and how this furthering of technological knowledge affected political relations in the 20th century.

I will take a biographical approach focusing on engineer Kenneth Cantlie (1899-1986), an influential figure operating in the spaces between nations throughout his career in Europe, Argentina, India, China and Africa between the 1920s and 1980s. An in-between figure, Cantlie was not politically neutral or passive. He built an extensive network of personal and professional connections with power brokers, governmental agencies and political figures, such as the Kadoorie family, Sun Yat-Sen’s family, Soong Ching-ling, Harold MacMillan and Zhou Enlai.

In my PhD, I will reconstruct Cantlie’s social networks and examine to what extent and how he overcame the diplomatic and social constraints reshaping Britain’s international relations within a broader context of imperial and post-imperial change across a turbulent 20th century. I am interested in the questions around decolonisation of the history of transport and railways and will re-examine the Euro-centric view of transmitting technological knowledge from ‘centre’ to the colonies.

The primary resource of this project is the Kenneth Cantlie Archive, a substantial collection of correspondence, draft notes, official documents, photographs, maps, drawings, technical calculations, publications and film. I will contrast and compare these materials with collections held in other repositories and examine how valuable Cantlie’s personal papers are for reconstructing his social network and processes of technological change.

The AHRC-funded project is in collaboration with the National Railway Museum (SMG) and the University of York.