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 tion, together with the political and military changes accompanying it, gave Western states a genuine technical and organisational superiority over non-Westem countries which previously they had not possessed. (This last factor was especially important in Asia.) Finally, the technological changes of the mid-nineteenth century gave the West the means to develop large territorial empires in previously inhospitable lands. Railways were foremost among these innovations, but not alone. Beside them were quinine, which conquered malaria; the steamship which, like the railway, had first been used in the early nineteenth century but only emerged as a practical tool for long distance traffic after the 1860s; and the electric telegraph, which in the 1870s was extended across the world.1 The fact that the railway age and the era of the new imperialism coincided was not accidental, because the railway and imperialism were interdependent. In Asia, Africa and the Americas, imperial penetration always began from ports: indeed it had been in Asian and African ports that Europeans had settled to trade and make money ever since their great breakthrough in blue-water navigation in the fifteenth century. And, until the eighteenth century, on the whole it was in ports that they stayed, content with the profitable business of buying commodities cheap and selling them dear. Moreover, the pre-railway territorial empires created in the century or so after 1757 were on the whole either for European settlers (notably British North America and Australia) or acquired to protect the older trading ports (as in the expansion of British India and the Netherlands Indies). It was only in the railway age that modem economic patterns and Western political control came to most of the globe. So striking is the relationship between imperialism and railway building that we can genuinely discuss a phenomenon called ‘railway imperialism’. It was in fact the direct descendent of that better-known nineteenth-century phenomenon, ‘gunboat diplomacy’.1 2 Empire-builders used railways to create regions with a coherently developed economy centred on a port. The railway would ensure the economic domination of this hinterland, and often its political control as well. The obstacles they had to overcome were varied: some were natural, like escarpments, jungles, deserts and rivers; others 1 For a discussion of the importance of technology to the spread of empire, see Headrick, Daniel R : The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York 1981. 2 For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Davis, Clarence - Wilburn, Kenneth - Robinson, Ronald (Ed.): Railway Imperialism. New York 1991. 93
