About
Polycolonial Matches examines the history of Swedish Match and the Western India Match Company (WIMCO) through the entangled histories of Sweden, India, United Kingdom, and Japan. It follows the movement of capital, technology, labour, commodities and commercial knowledge across colonial and postcolonial settings, asking how a Swedish industrial enterprise became embedded in Indian economic and social life.
The project approaches the match industry as a history of industrial modernity rather than simply of one company. Factories, workers, timber, machinery, markets, advertising and matchbox labels provide ways of tracing the infrastructures and relationships through which Swedish industry participated in the making of modern India, while also examining what these connections produced for Sweden.