Blood, Iron and Gold: How the railways transformed the world (original) (raw)

Introduction – New Insights and Perceptions on Railway History

Journal of History of Science and Technology, 2018

special issue: new insights and perceptions on railway history Throughout the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, railways played a vital role in the construction of nations, economic growth, technological development and the dominance of Western nations over sundry African, Asian, and Latin American territories. In more or less recent years, different authors have emphasised this agency in several of their classical works, reflecting in some way the representations and the feeling of technological sublime 1 that contemporaries of the first decades of the locomotive had. Hobsbawm called them the most spectacular symbol of the nineteenth century, 2 while Adas deemed them pioneers of civilisation, conquerors of time and space, unrivalled promoters of migrations, settlement and 1 That is, the pleasure of observing a moving machine, as a symbol of the triumph of technology and Man's ingenuity. Kasson considered the railway "the most common vehicle of the technological sublime."

Introduction: Precarious Connections: On the Promise and Menace of Railroad Projects

2020

Th is introduction attempts to situate railroads, which have rarely been the object of ethnographic attention, within current debates of anthropology and related disciplines. While mobility is certainly one dimension of human-railroad entanglements, the introduction calls to explore political, social, material, and aff ective lives of railroads in Europe and Asia as well. Often, connections provided by railroads are precarious at best: enveloped in state and local politics, they appear to some as promise and to others as menace. Planning, construction, decay, and reconstruction constitute the temporal and material life cycle of these infrastructures. Attending to particular ethnographic and historical contexts, the introduction aims to demonstrate how railroads, these potent symbols of modernity, continue to be good to think with.

RAILROADS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Historiography on Portuguese railroads has not paid much attention neither to their regional effects, nor to the relationship between the operation of this form of transportation and population evolution. In fact, available studies usually adopt a national approach and analyze the contribution of railroads to the overall development of the country. The main argument of this paper is that in the Portuguese case, access to railroads reinforced pre-existing territorial inequalities and promoted different regional dynamics, mainly with regard to population growth, urban development and population mobility. In reality, in the more developed regions, railroad access helped increase population concentration in the areas served by this infrastructure. The railways also favored the growth of pre-existing urban centers and the emergence of new ones. They also encouraged migration into towns, thus contributing to their growth. In the Inland North, where the Tua line is integrated, traditionally affected by greater transportation difficulties, railroads seem to have operated in the opposite direction, contributing to a decline in population relative to the other regions of Portugal. Moreover, this area continued to be characterized by a predominance of modest-sized cities, unable to match the dynamism of the urban centers in the coastal regions or to attract a migrant population to aid in their development. Instead, since the end of the nineteenth century, this region suffered from an increasing emigration that railroads seem to have facilitated. To explain this evolution we must also take into account the economic crisis that affected the agriculture of this part of the country, but the presence of the railroad seems to have been a significant factor. In this paper, we will try to put the Tua line in this context, comparing its effects on population with those caused by the Beira Baixa line in another Portuguese mountainous region around the city of Covilhã.

The development of the railway network in Britain 1825-1911

2018

This chapter describes the development of the British railway network during the nineteenth century and indicates some of its effects. It is intended to be a general introduction to the subject and takes advantage of new GIS (Geographical Information System) maps to chart the development of the railway network over time much more accurately and completely than has hitherto been possible. The GIS dataset stems from collaboration by researchers at the University of Cambridge and a Spanish team, led by Professor Jordi Marti-Henneberg, at the University of Lleida. Our GIS dataset derives ultimately from the late Michael Cobb’s definitive work ‘The Railways of Great Britain. A Historical Atlas’. Our account of the development of the British railway system makes no pretence at originality, but the chapter does present some new findings on the economic impact of the railways that results from a project at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Professor Dan Bogart at the Univers...

Mobility for the Mainland: The Contribution of the Railway to the Emergence of the Age of Speed

Historical Research Letter, 2013

Railway - not only as a means of transport, but also as a technological invention and a social construction - was mainly responsible for the diffusion of the Industrial Environment. With the Railways broadly disseminated in space, the natural environment was innovated. In England, especially, the transition was gradual, surpassing the previous slow rates of the canals transportation. By contrast, in developing areas such as the Balkans, the gap between pre-industrial and railway transport was enormous, because, until then, the chances for continental mobility were quite uncommon. In general, however, Railways and Industry provoked novel theoretical conceptions such as calculations of risks relating to technology, problems of governance and control of technical systems, energy policy, environmental issues, computational technology, scientific management, globalization and many other areas of development of the technological systems. Keywords: Railways, Mobility, Globalization

The Socio-Economic Impact of the Railway

2015

Using extant literature, archives, oral interviews, and new tools of historical analysis such as songs, poems, and photographs, this study describes the experience of railway development in the rural communities between Kano and Zaria, from 1908 to the 1970s. Also subsumed in this study is a history of these communities seen through the lens of the railway. Built with the imperialist motive to transport cotton for the metropolitan industries, the railway had enormous effects on the social and cultural landscape of the local communities. The effects