Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
II. Die Wahrnehmungen von Raum / The perceptions of space - Robert Lee: Railways, space and imperialism
Robert Lee However, the use of railways for state-building and imperial purposes was not confined to colonial territories. Quite early in the history of railways, European and American governments built railways for such purposes. Both the pioneering Baltimore and Ohio Railroad of the 1830s and the Union Pacific Railroad of the 1860s, for instance, were national projects of the US government, as it sought, successfully, to lay claim to the breadth of the continent. The Semmering Railway also was largely about strengthening the Habsburg state’s control of the Adriatic. In Latin America, railways redefined national borders and even provoked war in the 1880s which led to Bolivia losing its access to the sea. Finally, railways not only defined space, they also modified people’s behaviour. Railway-builders, above all in colonial and semi-colonial settings, were aware of this and used the railway for cultural and educative as well as commercial and political purposes. This cultural aspect of the railway extended quite widely to those who worked on and used this most powerful tool of modernity, especially in traditional and conservative societies. 2. Physical Space and State Creation Global railway construction was part of a large and complex phenomenon, the age of the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century. The results of this phenomenon are easy to describe: virtually all humanity was brought under the control of a handful of Western empires, of which the British was easily the largest. Even those countries which escaped direct European rule - the Latin American republics, the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan and Siam (modem Thailand) - came under less formal but every bit as rigorous Western economic and political domination. The process meant that, very quickly over about half a century, nearly all humanity was exposed to the Western ideas, economic systems and technology. In this process the railway, obviously, was crucial. While describing the new imperialism may be relatively easy, explaining it is far more complex. In brief, economic pressures, arising from the very success of industrialisation, helped push Western powers into imperialist policies. Ideas current at the time, notably the creed of free trade and a belief in social Darwinism, or the right of the strong to dominate the weak, gave imperialism an intellectual respectability and moral justification. The spread of democracy in Western countries encouraged politicians to play the imperialist card as a means of winning electoral favour. The industrial revolu92
