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 ways as a tool of empire. As Viceroy of India, in 1901 he derided dreams of linking India and China by rail as phantasms, engineering and financial impossibilities: ‘Were a bonfire made tomorrow,’ he declaimed, in Rangoon of all places, ‘of the prolific literature to which it [the Burma-China railway] has given birth, I do not think anyone in the world would be the loser.’7 At a time when imperialist expectations of railway construction were very high, Curzon’s bleak realism was a rare commodity indeed. This was an interesting demonstration of the limits of railway imperialism. The technology did have its limits, and if costs were too high, the political or economic end could not justify the investment. It was on this rock that British plans to link Burma and China by rail foundered. So, even the most ardent imperial railway builders of all, the British, recognised the limits of the use of railways for this purpose. 3.2. Railway Policy in Independent Asian States The railway came to Asia very much as a tool of Western imperialists for the benefit of Western imperialists. Thus, on the whole, both ambitious railway schemes and more solid railway building in Asia were the products of Western imperialists. However, three traditional Asian states, Japan, China and Siam, retained some degree of sovereignty during the late nineteenth century including some control over railway policy. It was not long before the elites of these Asian states, which remained independent, realised that they could exploit this Western technology for their own benefit every bit as effectively as the Europeans. The development of railways in the two continental states, Siam and China, was influenced both by competing worldviews within the traditional elites and by Western imperial aspirations for which the term ‘informal’ seems a little too modest.* * In the independent Asian states, railways were used, much as in Western colonies and indeed in Western countries, as tools to reinforce and strengthen states. The economic benefits of railway building were often subordinate in the minds of their proponents to political factors, although investors in railway schemes, whether Western or Asian, naturally enough wanted them to be profitable. The first Asian state to embrace 7 Quoted in Lee: France and the Exploitation of China, p. 251. * Two accounts of Chinese railway policy are Huenemann, R.W.: The Dragon and the Iron Horse, the Economics of Railroads in China, 1876 1937. Cambridge, Massachussetts 1984; and Kent, Percy H.B.: Railway Enterprise in China. London 1907. 98
