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This article questions the economic rationale of colonial experimentation and prison labor, arguing that for many administrators a prison-based experiment's success mattered less than its existence. It examines the position of convict labor and penal discipline within colonial industrial experiments in colonial India, where convicts performed experiments for what one administrator described as \"the most penal\" form of labor, papermaking. The belief that Indian fibers could open a new export market for global papermaking meant that prisons became prominent sites of experimentation with new pulps. Regional prisons gained state monopolies for handmade paper, often decimating local independent producers. Yet prison and industrial officers counterintuitively positioned the frequent failures of papermaking experiments as a continuing potential source for industrial improvement. They argued that the failures demonstrated the need to improve discipline and supervision. Prison experiments slotted convicts into repetitive, mechanized roles that served European investigations into the utility of Indian products.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monumental Muslim tombs in India served as spaces for refashioning local religious and social identities. Elite patrons, technical overseers, and stoneworkers engaged with new technologies of construction at sites meant to reflect claims on the Muslim past. This article interrogates divergent class understandings of monumental Muslim tombs in colonial-era India. It compares the construction of monumental Islamic tombs in the states of Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Rampur—three Muslim-led ‘native states’, quasi-autonomous polities under colonial oversight. By the late nineteenth century, many native state patrons employed a new middle class of technical intermediary to oversee tomb construction. The rise of this class created new hierarchies within construction, with apprenticeship-trained master craftsmen increasingly marginalized from state narratives and aligned with stoneworkers and other labourers. While patrons and middle-class intermediaries argued that new technologies and materials should be used to ‘modernize’ construction, they portrayed technical change as divorced from the religious symbolism of tombs. In contrast, workers integrated the religious and the technical, positioning technologies of construction within narratives of Muslim practice. The article uses native state tombs to analyse how labourers adapted to technical demands, without necessarily adopting state ideologies.