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 Critical to the spread of railways around the world were some changes in railway technology after the middle of the nineteenth century. These changes meant that it became economic to build railways in far more remote areas than was the case up to the middle of the century. These innovations concerned gauge and metallurgy. In short, what they meant was that building railways became cheaper, and the railways themselves were more robust. The two big innovations here were the replacement of iron with steel rails and the introduction of narrow gauges. The Bessemer process of steel manufacture was invented in 1851, but steel was not widely used in railway applications until after 1870. Steel rails lasted far longer than iron, and their additional cost was usually recovered within less than a decade. Narrow gauge railways dated from the 1860s. The first significant narrow-gauge systems were built in Norway and Queensland, Australia. Both were 3 ft 6 in gauge lines, but soon a multiplicity of narrow gauges was in use. The most common were 760 mm or 2 ft 6 in (concentrated in Austria-Hungary but widespread elsewhere); three feet (in the USA and parts of Latin America); one metre (in Europe, India, central Africa, much of Latin America, and southeast Asia); and the pioneering 3 ft 6 in (in southern and west Africa, Java, Japan and parts of Australia). Narrow gauges enabled railways to be built where previously they would have been too expensive. It was an important technological innovation, and one with considerable consequences in terms of the reach of colonial railways. 3. Some Case Studies 3.1. Railways and Empire-building in East and Southeast Asia During the last years of the nineteenth century, the railway was the chosen tool of European empire-builders in Asia. It was at this time that the European empires acquired their final boundaries, and the role of railways in that process was critical. Thus, on China’s northern frontier, Russian Finance Minister Sergius Witte both consolidated the Russian Far Eastern Empire and laid the abortive foundations of another in Manchuria with the building of the Transiberian and Chinese Eastern railways. At the same time, on China’s southern frontier both British and French adventurers staked out imperial claims with railway proposals which were at times as fanciful as they were ambitious. The earliest proposal dated from 1866 and envisaged the connection of the British Burmese port of Moulmein with Simao in Yunnan through Chiang Mai. At that time the concept of a frontier scarcely existed on the upper Salween or Mekong, but clearly this would anticipate British domination of both northern Siam and part of Yunnan. By the early 1880s, two energetic British imperial publicists. Holt Hallett and 96
