About

The research project From Imperial Markets to Postcolonial Networks: The Swedish Match Industry and the Reconfiguration of Global Trade in South Asia, c. 1920–1970 is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and runs from 2026 to 2029 (Grant No. 2025-01142). It examines the history of Swedish Match and the Western India Match Company (WIMCO) through the interconnected histories of Sweden, India, the United Kingdom and Japan, asking how the Swedish match industry expanded within, adapted to and helped reshape changing commercial worlds across the colonial and postcolonial periods.

At the centre of the project is the movement of capital, technology, labour, timber, machinery, commodities and commercial knowledge across political and geographical boundaries. WIMCO provides an especially productive vantage point for tracing these processes because its history spans both colonial and postcolonial India. The company operated within markets shaped by British imperial structures, competed with Japanese and Indian producers, depended upon Indian labour and natural resources, and became embedded in local systems of production, distribution and consumption. Following these relationships allows the project to examine how a Swedish industrial enterprise secured and maintained a powerful position in South Asia while responding to nationalism, decolonisation and changing forms of state regulation.

The project therefore approaches the match industry not simply as the history of a single company, but as a window onto wider histories of industrial modernity and global economic change. Factories, workers, forests, technologies, advertising, distribution networks and matchbox labels make it possible to connect corporate history with labour, environmental history, visual culture and everyday consumption. At the same time, the project asks what these overseas connections produced for Sweden itself by tracing how capital, expertise, commercial experience and knowledge circulated between South Asia and Northern Europe. In doing so, it explores how industrial relationships forged under empire were reworked rather than simply dissolved with the end of colonial rule.