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
Railways, space and imperialism strictly defined; no foreign loans were contracted until 1904, by which time the Anglo- French entente made Siam much more secure; and dividends never fell below three per cent for the first thirty years of the twentieth century. This meant that it was the users of the Siamese railways who ultimately paid for the national political and economic benefits the railways conferred. 4. Psychological Space Railways, then, clearly could make a big difference to physical space, and in other ways besides the obvious one of shrinking it. They could change geography, since for the first time, human beings could overcome the realities of the natural world they inhabited. Rails of steel could replace, even destroy in social and economic terms, the age-old flow of rivers and dividing barriers of mountains. Nothing before had been able to do that in such a style, and the consequences were enormous. Borders changed, and, for the first time on land, technology could impose new political structures. At sea, of course, these changes had been going on for a long time, with Europeans leading the way since the days of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus. But the railway extended that process to land. In transforming the use of space, railways also transformed that space itself, often profoundly. This was felt first in the pioneering countries of railway development, above all in England. Here, although the railway had grown out of existing patterns of life and technology, its impact could be shocking. It was, in fact, the shock of the new, which could be abrupt and severe even in England. In places as close to the cradle of railway development as Derbyshire and Yorkshire there was anti-railway sentiment. Landowners tried to prevent railways passing through their estates, and common people often resented the intrusion of the new technology. Luddite attitudes extended quite widely through society. They can be seen in the opposition to so many railway acts in Parliament;14 in the attitudes of many prosperous Englishmen so forcefully articulated by William Cobbitt, the author of Rural Rides, a panegyric to an England disappearing under an apparent sea of rails; and even in Queen Victoria’s refusal to allow a railway to be built to her summer retreat at Balmoral in Scotland. Victoria, though, wanted to 14 Robert Stephenson encountered much such opposition, as he told Samuel Smiles when the latter wrote his biography. See, for example, Smiles, Samuel: Lives of the Engineers, with an account of their principal works, comprising also a history of inland communications in Britain, Vol. 3. London 1863, p. 305 f. 103
