Wilson extends his argument about the precariousness of British power in India to the railroad era:

"The decades that straddled the great Indian rebellion of 1857 saw the emergence of a new kind of British power in India, based not on violence against people but the capacity to shape the physical environment of the subcontinent. These were years when men like James Berkley and George Clark were given large amounts of money to spend on public works. They saw the construction of irrigation canals and dams, telegraph lines, roads and eventually railways, all attempts to impose British authority on Indian rock and soil with brick, stone and steel. Later imperial bureaucrats and historians suggested this kind of geological imperialism was driven by the effort to improve a society they believed was backward. Others see it as part of the integration of India into global markets, to create what the historian John Darwin calls ‘the British World-System’. In fact, it began as little more than the limited British attempt to shore up their shaky grip on power." #TeachWorldHistory

(p. 268) Kindle Edition.