How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

The agricultural practices associated with the green revolution assumed their fullest form in the state of Punjab and are commonly associated with the launch of HYVs in 1964-66. But in reality, Punjab had been undergoing a process of agrarian transformations for a long time. Punjab developed as the subcontinent’s most productive agrarian region during colonial times. Though the partition disrupted the region’s agricultural infrastructures, the state embarked upon a massive phase of rebuilding under the leadership of a handful of bureaucrats with a technocratic vision. These efforts were tailored to build a system of productive agriculture to restore the province’s pre-partition preeminence. The pursuit of productivity trumped every other agenda in Punjab and a spell of regional technocracy took hold. The American experts arriving under the Indo-US treaties and those sent over by the American foundations believed that the modernization of Indian agriculture must start from Punjab. When the HYVs arrived, Punjab was readier than any other region.

This chapter examines the military and economic centrality of granary networks to the Nationalists’ war effort. The centralization of land tax and its collection in kind restored the granary’s historic importance as the storehouse of state wealth. However, the chapter moves away from the dominant portrayal of granaries as economic stabilizers and disaster relief mechanisms to emphasize their strategic significance for an agrarian state at war. In examining the government’s establishment of a national grain reserve scheme and its construction of granary networks throughout its territories, the chapter presents the granary as an integral part of wartime economic policy and military logistical organization. It also studies the amassing of grain reserves in southwestern Yunnan for the Chinese Expeditionary Force after the fall of Burma, a significant but forgotten effort. Unlike most studies, it pays close attention to day-to-day operations, such as checking the quality of delivered grain and preventing spoilage. These everyday procedures are a window into how the demands of war concretely shaped civilian life and illustrate that granaries were key sites of state-society interaction.

This chapter discusses the political economy facets of the relationship between the Indian state and the unlikely rollout of a mega-scale financial architecture known as India Stack. How did a state historically inadequate at providing public goods at scale roll out a postindustrial project of mega-proportions in record time? What are the distributional outcomes and the social meanings that arise from such an undertaking? The chapter shows that the materiality and legitimacy of India Stack rests upon the historical continuations of, or, in some cases, departures from, collective understandings in society and business about the role of the state. The chapter explores the calculations, coercions, and creativity of the India Stack infrastructure. The state’s infrastructural gaze has been central to the endeavor of the fintech infrastructure that offers both continuity and departure from the way the Indian state has functioned historically.

As payment is increasingly becoming part of social media, it takes on the operating, governance, and revenue models of the Silicon Valley tech industry. At the same time, new platform payments “ride the rails” of long-standing infrastructures. These conditions create opportunities for surveillance and infrastructural power, as well as new unanticipated harms for users. As the future of money is imagined, it is wise to contemplate a payment ecosystem that is – like social media more broadly – increasingly private, siloed, and rife with scams.

From an “infrastructural gaze,” this chapter examines the penetration of artificial intelligence (AI) in capital markets as a blend of continuity and change in finance. The growing infrastructural dimension of AI originates first from the evolution of algorithmic trading and governance, and second, from its ascent as a “general-purpose technology” within the financial domain. The text discusses the consequences of this “infrastructuralization” of financial AI, considering the micro–macro tension typical of capital accumulation and crisis dynamics. Challenging the commonly espoused notion of AI as a stabilizing force, the analysis underscores its connections with volatile, crisis-prone financialized dynamics. It concludes by outlining potential consequences (unpredictability, operational inefficiency, complexity, further concentration) and (systemic) risks arising from the emergence of AI as a “new” financial infrastructure, particularly those related to biases in data and data commodification, lack of explanation of underlying models, algorithmic collusion, and network effects. The text asserts that a thorough understanding of these hazards can be attained by adopting a perspective that considers the macro/meso/micro connections inherent in infrastructures.

Since the 1970s, global finance has taken on a systemic character, made starkly visible after Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008. Fifteen years later, how can we understand the ongoing reliance of society and economy on interconnected financial markets? This chapter examines the Anglo-American context with a global perspective, proposing that infrastructure is key to understanding why capitalist states and societies remain unable or unwilling to reduce the financial sector’s influence. By focusing on financial derivatives, particularly their liquid, marketized forms, it shows how these instruments forge new spatial and temporal connections. Despite political resistance, maintaining this liquidity has become a technical matter, obscuring the political-economic contradictions tied to socioeconomic inequality. Capitalist states now view derivative and broader financial markets as systems to be safeguarded from breakdowns or illiquidity, requiring immediate repair during crises. Extending the concept of (il)liquidity and drawing on infrastructural inversion, the chapter argues that financial markets exist in a perpetual state of breakdown, necessitating constant maintenance and repair.

Local politics are dominated by older residents, who vote and participate at rates very disproportionate to their share of the population. At the same time, local government has been assigned responsibility for functions featuring inherent generational divides: most pointedly, public education, but also infrastructure development and land use regulation. This combination raises concerns about democratic distortion and local government’s continued ability to invest in the future. If predictions of substantially longer lifespans come true, these concerns about the local political economy will only be heightened. This chapter identifies this tension and reviews how local governments currently manage age-based political conflict. It then describes the limitations of these mechanisms and offers a schematic for the strategies that local governments will have to adopt as they navigate the fault lines of age moving forward: by better aligning the preferences of older and younger residents, by equalizing patterns of political participation, or by reassigning functions that implicate age away from the local level.

Behind the black boxes of algorithms promoting or adding friction to posts, technical design decisions made to affect behavior, and institutions stood up to make decisions about content online, it can be easy to lose track of the heteromation involved, the humans spreading disinformation and, on the other side, moderating or choosing not to moderate it. This can be aptly shown in the case of the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp during Brazil’s 2018 general elections. Since WhatsApp runs on a peer-to-peer architecture, there was no algorithm curating content according to the characteristics or demographics of the users, which is how filter bubbles work on Facebook. Instead, a human infrastructure was assembled to create a pro-Bolsonaro environment on WhatsApp and spread misinformation to bolster his candidacy. In this paper, we articulate the labor executed by the human infrastructure of misinformation as hetoromation.

This chapter presents a thought experiment. We image a perfect carbon price coursing through the economy and coming into contact with other market failures conventionally identified by environmental economists. At these points of contact, we discover other social striations that need confrontation for successful decarbonization.

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book by juxtaposing the workings of Accra’s old, established station with the designated function of a government-mandated and top-down administered public road transport terminal – the ‘new station’, as Accra’s urbanites have pithily dubbed it. It scales up the comparison to consider the significance of urban infrastructure as a ‘hard’ technical system and as a ‘soft’ system of sociality in relation to questions of governance, social order, and the significance of usage. Finally, it reflects on the broader implications of this study by pointing out empirical and theoretical continuities with the practices, places, and politics of urban hustle that go beyond this particular case of a West African bus station.

The introduction describes some of the key features and the wide range of actors and activities that characterise the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana’s capital. It then presents two meanings of hustle that capture the station’s workings: as a noun, describing crowded, hectic, and potentially confusing situations; and as a verb, denoting precarious yet venturesome economic activities. Building on the ambivalences evoked by the different uses and perspectives of the term, it situates the significance of this study in relation to scholarly discussions of transport work, the ‘informal economy’, (auto)mobility, infrastructure, and urban social life. It then outlines the diversity of functions and types of Ghanaian bus stations, and concludes with a reflection on methodology, highlighting the value of a single-sited ethnographic approach to urban complexity and trans-local mobility, and an itinerary of the book’s chapters.